AUSTIN – Much remains to be learned about what happened in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. But almost from the moment that rioters stormed the Capitol, it has been clear that America’s constitutional order resisted Donald Trump’s effort to subvert it.

The available evidence suggests that Trump supported a cockamamie scheme to have Vice President Mike Pence refuse to certify the results showing that Joe Biden had won the Electoral College vote. The idea was that amid the confusion created by unauthorized self-appointed state electors, congressional Republicans would award Trump a second term.

But the scheme was doomed to fail, because key Republicans refused to play along. Pence eschewed his assigned role in the scheme, as did Attorney General William Barr and other high-ranking executive branch officials. Republican state officials in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as well as federal judges – including some appointed by Trump – also stood their ground.

Moreover, most of the congressional Republicans who challenged the election results believed they were engaging in a mere formality that would protect them from retaliation by far-right voters without changing anything. And those Republicans, in turn, were following precedents set by Democrats who challenged electoral results from states in previous elections in 2001, 2005 and 2017.

Although opposition within Trump’s own administration and party sank Trump’s seditious plan, many Democrats argue that a similar scheme might succeed in 2024. But any repeat attempt to alter the Electoral College results on behalf of a Republican loser would require an unlikely degree of collaboration among dozens, if not hundreds, of Republican members of Congress, state legislatures, and federal courts. And this time, there would be no element of surprise.

Yes, scaremongers would say that unlike in 2020, Trump-backed officials may hold many key election-administration positions in 2024. But these Trumpist legions would have to be far more loyal and disciplined than previous loyalists like Pence and Barr. And each would need to be willing to risk his or her own political future on the success of a complex conspiracy that would chiefly benefit a notoriously disloyal individual who routinely uses people and then throws them away.

Moreover, Trump’s influence over Republican candidates is exaggerated. He tends to endorse those who are likely to win their primary or general elections anyway. More to the point, his hold on his base is unclear, as demonstrated by the many followers who publicly boo him when he endorses COVID-19 vaccines.

For these reasons, a scenario in which Trump (or one of his allies) is designated president by the House of Representatives after the 2024 election probably belongs in the realm of political-thriller fiction.

Now consider the unlikely event that Trump were nominated and won a clear Electoral College or popular-vote majority in 2024. Rather than establish the white-nationalist dictatorship of progressive nightmares, an elderly second-term Trump would most likely be an even more ineffectual figurehead in a party dominated by conventional Republicans than he was in his first four years. If Italian democracy could survive three terms of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister, American democracy can survive two terms of Trump.

None of this is to suggest that American democracy is not under threat. Populist demagogues like Trump are symptoms of a disease in the body politic. The real threat to American democracy is the disconnect between what the bipartisan US political establishment promises and what it delivers. This problem predates Trump by decades and helps to explain his rise.

Contrary to what was promised, globalization did not produce new and better jobs for most Americans in the high-tech “knowledge economy.” Instead, the US has become dependent on China and other countries for basic manufactured goods, including drugs and medical equipment. Most US job creation over the last three decades has been in low-wage positions with few or no benefits.

Similarly, in the 2000s, America’s financial elites claimed that the “Great Moderation” in global macroeconomic volatility represented a permanent “new normal.” But it turned out to be dependent on asset bubbles that burst, causing the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. And US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya produced only outright failures or continuing quagmires.

Many of the architects of these colossal disasters have gone on to establish lucrative careers as respected experts. Few have suffered financial or reputational losses. When a national establishment fails so often and at such cost, and when mainstream media sources remain complicit in those failures, no one should be surprised if citizens look to alternative media sources, including crazy ones, or turn to outsider politicians, including narcissistic demagogues like Trump.

Americans must be on their guard to prevent corrupt politicians’ illegal and immoral attempts to alter electoral results. But the real long-term threat to American democracy is the lack of popular trust in conventional politicians whose policies have repeatedly failed. And for that lack of public trust, American elites have nobody to blame but themselves.

BERKELEY – If you are concerned about the well-being of the United States and interested in what the country could do to help itself, stop what you are doing and read historian Geoffrey Kabaservice’s superb 2012 book, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. To understand why, allow me a brief historical interlude.

Until roughly the start of the seventeenth century, people generally had to look back in time to find evidence of human greatness. Humanity had reached its peak in long lost golden ages of demigods, great thinkers, and massive construction projects. When people did look to the future for promise of a better world, it was a religious vision they conjured – a city of God, not of man. When they looked to their own society, they saw that it was mostly the same as in the past, with Henry VIII and his retinue holding court in much the same fashion as Agamemnon, or Tiberius Caesar, or Arthur.

But then, around 1600, people in Western Europe noticed that history was moving largely in one particular direction, owing to the expansion of humankind’s technological capabilities. In response to seventeenth-century Europeans’ new doctrine of progress, conservative forces have represented one widely subscribed view of how societies should respond to the political implications of technological and social change. In doing so, they have generally gathered themselves into four different kinds of political parties.

The first comprises reactionaries: those who simply want to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘STOP,’” as William F. Buckley, Jr. famously put it. Reactionaries consider themselves to be at war with a dystopian “armed doctrine” with which compromise is neither possible nor desirable. In the fight against this foe, no alliance should be rejected, even if it is with factions that would otherwise be judged evil or contemptible.

The second kind of party favors “Whig measures and Tory men.” These conservatives can see that technological and social change might be turned to human advantage, provided that the changes are guided by leaders with a keen appreciation of the value of our historical patrimony and of the dangers of destroying existing institutions before building new ones. As Tancredi explains to his uncle, the Prince of Salina, in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.”

The third type of conservative party is found primarily (but not exclusively) in America. It emerges as an adaptation to a society that sees itself as overwhelmingly new and liberal. It is not a party of tradition and inherited status, but rather of wealth and business. In its ranks are conservatives who want to remove government-imposed hurdles to technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Confident that the free market holds the key to generating wealth and prosperity, they breathlessly tout the merits of surfing its waves of Schumpeterian creative destruction.

Lastly, there is the home of the fearful and the grifters who exploit them. This constituency includes all those who believe it is they who will be creatively destroyed by the processes of historical change. They feel (or are led to believe) that they are beset on all sides by internal and external enemies who are more powerful than they are and eager to “replace” or “cancel” them.

What I have learned from Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 bestseller, How Democracies Die, is that democratic countries can be governed well only if their conservative parties fall into the second or third of the four categories above. When conservatives coalesce around reaction or fear, democratic institutions come under threat.

Levitsky and Ziblatt offer many examples to demonstrate this, but let me add one more. A little over a century ago, Great Britain experienced an astonishingly rapid decline from its position as the world’s political and economic hyper-power. This process was accelerated significantly by the transformation of its Tory Party into a party combining types one and four. This was the party of Mafeking Night (Boer War) celebrations and armed resistance to Irish constitutional reform. In the 1910-14 period, George Dangerfield later recalled, the world witnessed the “strange death of liberal England.”

That brings us back to Kabaservice’s book, which tells the story of how the US Republican Party put itself on an analogous course. When I look out at the current political scene, I see very few elements of categories two and three in the Republican Party. And any that are left are fast disappearing.

Republican politicians today are desperate to pick up the mantle of Donald Trump, undoubtedly one of the worst presidents in American history. Obviously, this dangerous and embarrassing trend needs to be reversed as rapidly and as completely as possible. But I, for one, am at a loss to see how that might be done.

WASHINGTON, DC – The first anniversary of the mob attack on the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, is coinciding with a new and dramatic phase of a congressional committee’s investigation of what happened and what measures might prevent such violence from happening again.

In the days leading up to the anniversary, the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans (most Republicans opposed any inquiry), began to reveal the extraordinary amount of material it had gathered thus far. Unsurprisingly, Trump and his allies have adopted the strategy of attempting to drag out the committee’s proceedings, in the presumption that a Republican victory in the midterm elections this November will allow them to shut down the committee before it has completed its work.

But in a recent interview, the committee’s chair, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said that it will cut off its inquiry whenever that’s necessary in order to get its report written and distributed to the public. Obviously, they want that to be before the midterm elections.

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who may have the most intellectual heft of anyone on the committee, recently told me: “The Committee’s central goals must be informational, educational and legislative. We need to tell a comprehensive and fine-grained story about the attack on America that will lead to our recommendations for fortifying American democracy.”

This suggests that the committee seeks to follow the model of the 9/11 Commission, which examined in minute detail the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and wrote a compelling narrative. Actually, the Capitol riot and the September 11 attacks, known by their dates, have other similarities.

Both shocked the nation because they broke long-assumed boundaries. Neither should have been as surprising as they were: in both cases there was ample intelligence to warn of what was afoot. But in both, critical figures ignored that information.

As for how the January 6 committee views its assignment, Raskin told me, “January 6 featured three rings of activity: an outer ring of a ‘wild’ protest that turned into a riot; a middle ring of a violent insurrection led by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Militiamen, and the QAnon networks; and an inner ring of the coup where Trump, Bannon, Stone, Flynn, and various Congressional allies worked to reverse Biden’s Electoral College majority and force the contest into a House contingent election to be decided by a state-by-state tally. We are working to figure out all the strategic coordination and interaction among these three levels of activity.”

A question lurking around the inquiry has been whether prosecutions should be sought, not just for the demonstrators, of whom hundreds have been charged for their violent behavior in answering then-President Trump’s call to “fight like hell” to prevent Congress from validating Biden’s election. But should the followers be punished while the instigator is left free? Another issue coming to the fore is whether it’s more important to obtain prosecutions of key figures or to gain more information by granting pardons.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has been widely criticized for not being more aggressive in prosecuting the high-level figures who worked to overturn the 2020 election. In a speech from the Justice Department on January 5, Garland made a nonspecific vow to “follow the facts wherever they lead.” In fact, it’s understood that Biden’s White House has let the Justice Department know that the president would prefer that a prosecution of Trump arise from a civil probe by the Attorney General of New York into charges that Trump, Donald Jr., and Ivanka have engaged in tax dodging and bank fraud, rather than from action by the Justice Department. (A separate criminal investigation into how the Trump business was managed is also pending in New York.)

It’s understandable that Biden may be reluctant to prosecute his 2020 election opponent and potential opponent in 2024. Even if neither man runs in 2024, prosecution of a former president by his successor would be a huge distraction from Biden’s efforts to govern, would divide the country even further, and perhaps lead to even worse violence than a year ago.

In fact, employing violence over political issues is taking on an alarming respectability in the US. A couple of recent polls indicate a sharp rise in the percentages of Americans, particularly among Republicans, who believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified. And a CBS News-YouGov poll shows that a dismaying 62% of Americans expect the losing side in a presidential election to react violently. 

America has long had a violent streak, whether in the settling of the West or sectional economic issues, including slavery. Attempts to win Constitutional rights have been met with violence.

I believe that the recent employment of violence to settle a presidential election began in 2000 when forces supporting George W. Bush over Al Gore staged what was called the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Miami, over the counting of ballots to see who had won Florida, and thus the election. A thread connecting that event with the Capitol riot was the conspicuous presence at both of Roger Stone, the Republican operative and longtime Trump ally.

It’s become fashionable of late to talk of “how close we came” to losing our democracy in 2020 and 2021. I disagree, because Trump’s effort was so flawed, amateurish, and streaked with stupidity. Trump would have had to reverse the results in as many of three out of six closely contested states, a daunting challenge.

To overthrow the legitimate outcome of a presidential election goes deeply against the grain of American tradition. Moreover, both state and federal courts weren’t buying Trump’s arguments that the voting process in various states was corrupt.  

But Steve Bannon, Trump’s on-and-off close political adviser, has taken note of the places where, if Trump’s forces had more control, Trump might have won re-election. Changes to obtain that enhanced control are taking place across the country: in voting-rights laws, and, more important, in how the vote is counted. Call this “counting rights.” Republicans have long been more astute than Democrats about the advantages of winning state legislatures.

So, irrespective of the effectiveness of the January 6 committee report, the nature and safety of America’s democratic system remain up for grabs.

PRINCETON – The investigation by the US House Select Committee on January 6 is still a long way from establishing a comprehensive record of the assault on the Capitol last year, so one should resist facile generalizations about the insurrectionists. Ideally, the committee will uncover sufficient evidence to make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice for the lead conspirators, not just the foot soldiers.

Still, some basic statements about the rioters seem uncontroversial. For example, we know that many of those who attacked the seat of American democracy saw themselves as staunch defenders of the US Constitution. Did they simply have their facts wrong?

One key to understanding the event lies in a phenomenon that characterizes far-right parties and movements across countries: the promise of restoring privileged status to white men who think that women, nature, and the machinery of democracy ultimately belong to them. The Capitol was “taken” by assailants who displayed an astonishing sense of entitlement, chanting slogans like, “Whose house? Our house!” Observers who remarked that the insurrectionists behaved almost like tourists misinterpreted what they saw. Tourists – especially God-fearing conservative ones – generally do not illegally seize, deface, defecate in, or outright destroy the sites they visit.

A deeper insight into the day’s events comes from the German philosopher Eva von Redecker. Inspired by the medical phenomena of phantom pain and phantom limbs, she recently coined the term “phantom possession” to make sense of our era’s new authoritarianism.

For centuries, white men in America were entitled to claim much – including human beings – as their personal property. The natural environment was there for the taking, and women were expected to provide sex and various forms of care in accordance with coverture (legal submission to the husband). That their reproductive capacities were subject to men’s control went without saying.

The North American colonists seized territory that had first been declared terra nullius (land belonging to no one), even though there had in fact been many people there before. And while (white) women could not be bought and sold as property, coverture meant that women were effectively under men’s control. It is worth remembering that in some Western democracies, wives could not accept employment without their husband’s consent until the 1970s, and marital rape was not outlawed until the 1990s.

As the African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois famously observed, the right to oppress certain groups long served as compensation for poorer whites who themselves suffered under some form of domination. A sense of relative superiority generated a “psychological wage,” helping to keep the prevailing social structure intact.

Things have since changed. And though they have not changed fast enough (even Sweden still has a gender pay gap of at least 5%), the social transformation has been sufficient to generate the rage and resentment over phantom possessions that characterize far-right movements everywhere.

One hallmark of modern property is that you can generally do with it as you will. As the great eighteenth-century British jurist William Blackstone explained, property is “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world.” And under the Code Napoleon, one perquisite of owning property was the right to abuse or even destroy it.

There is a psychological dimension to this legal idea: An act of destruction can be used to prove that something is one’s own. This dynamic becomes horrendously clear when men decide to kill or disfigure the women they claim to love rather than tolerate their emancipation (which literally means an exit from property, from the Latin mancipium).

Viewed in this light, it is perhaps no surprise that most of the insurrectionists were men, many of whom donned military gear and pretended to engage in combat against supposed enemies of the US Constitution. The man who put his feet up on a desk in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office was asserting “despotic dominion,” seeking to make the phantom real.

As long as far-right acolytes assume that they are entitled to things that are in fact not theirs to own, it does little good to explain to them what democracy is really about, or to point out that they are attacking the very thing they claim to value. If US democracy is not exactly as they conceive it – the exclusive possession of white men – they would rather destroy it than let it become responsive to majorities comprising people of color.

Of course, far-right politics is not entirely reducible to misogyny. The far right’s constituency has always been a minority, so what matters most is whether far-right parties and politicians can form coalitions that will satisfy a broader set of groups. Donald Trump, for example, appealed to some segment of the wealthy who were looking for deregulation and tax breaks.

Nonetheless, as Shirin Ebadi and other female Nobel laureates note in a recent essay, “the foundational autocratic bargain” promises a “restoration of private privileges of men, and of economic and social elites, in exchange for tolerance of the erosion of democratic freedoms.” It thus calls for a systematic assault on anything resembling female self-ownership, not least women’s reproductive rights, which have been sharply curtailed in right-wing redoubts, most recently in Poland, Mississippi, and Texas.

In the grand scheme of things, it is tempting to interpret the far right’s rage as a sign that things ultimately are changing for the better. In this telling, it is the insurrectionists who constitute the “resistance,” and theirs is a losing battle.

But those who have suffered under Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and Poland’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, are still bearing the costs, as are the January 6 terrorists’ victims and their families. A full reversal of female and minority emancipation may be a far-right pipe dream, but further acts of destruction by white men seeking sole and despotic dominion are more than likely.

AUSTIN – With the anniversary of the January 6 riot now over, let’s focus on the big picture.

The great anomaly of the 2020 US presidential election was that Joe Biden won the national popular vote by seven million votes, yet came within 43,000 (in three close states) of losing the Electoral College, and thus the election. In California alone, Biden had five million more votes than he needed, and in New York, another two million.

So far this century, only Barack Obama has won decisive victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. In 2000 and 2016, the popular-vote winner lost the election. In 2004, the result turned on a single state: Ohio. This anomaly is not only persistent but constitutional, which makes it practically unsolvable.

Nevertheless, the 2020 election was a triumph for democracy. Turnout, as a proportion of eligible voters, was higher than in any election since 1900 (when the franchise was limited to males, almost all white). The COVID-19 pandemic forced local election administrators to innovate, and they did so with expanded voting by mail, early-voting days, 24-hour voting, and drive-in voting. More than 100 million ballots were cast before Election Day. In the end, Donald Trump’s final count was 11 million higher than it was in 2016, and Biden’s exceeded Hillary Clinton’s 2016 total by 15 million.

Low turnout in America is usually blamed on voter apathy, but 2020 proved that the real problem has always been barriers to voting. In previous elections, polling places were scarce, the ballots long and complex, and the whole process a slow one, with queues often stretching for hours. Many people lack the time, the patience, or the physical stamina to wait.

The system also discouraged any change in voting patterns, because local election boards allocated machines and poll workers according to past turnout. So there were never enough machines for new voters whenever turnout surged, anywhere at all, for any reason. The 2020 election was thus a great unintended experiment in blowing up the barriers to voting – and it worked.

Those now crying fraud cite the vast increase in turnout as evidence. In fact, the growth in turnout in so-called swing states was no greater than in states where the outcome was not in question. One exception was Arizona, where turnout grew by 30%. But once you adjust for Arizona’s rapid population growth, the proportionate increase is similar to California, where turnout fraud would have been pointless. In any event, the Arizona vote was administered by Republican officials.

Nor do the vote counts look suspicious. Votes are recorded and reported by county, and not merely at the state level. Any tampering with vote counts would have had to happen in specific counties. And because the 2020 election had a close precedent in 2016, strange changes in county voting patterns should be easy to spot.

An analysis of the county-by-county results by me and three colleagues compared the five swing states (Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) to five states that were foregone conclusions – California, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas. We did notice a few oddities. Along the Mexican border in Texas, for example, there was a sharp swing in outcomes toward Trump, clearly due to the prosperity brought by federal spending on the border. But these few counties are extremely small. Elsewhere in Texas, two large counties showed strong swings toward Biden, and the same was true of two large counties in Georgia. Those outcomes can be traced to voter mobilization and demographic change. Otherwise, the analysis shows that swing-state and non-swing-state shifts, in either direction, are not distinguishable in the data.

Why did Biden win? The simple answer can be found in the polling data. Compared to 2016, Trump did better with women, Blacks, and Hispanics, but he lost ground with white men, who shifted about five percentage points toward Biden. This shift was driven mainly by men who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but chose Trump over Clinton in 2016. Their return made the difference in three close states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – that had been decisive in 2016. Apart from being close, the swing states weren’t special; the overall shift to Biden was a bit larger in other states, including California, Texas, and New Jersey.

There is a great irony in how US presidential elections now play out. The states with the greatest growth in income inequality since the early 1990s – including California, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts – invariably vote Democratic. And the states where inequality has grown less largely (though not entirely) vote Republican. This pattern has been clear for decades, and it grows stronger with each presidential election.

What explains it? It is not about attitudes toward inequality – most people don’t know (or care) about inequality levels in their home state (which we computed for our study). Rather, it is that the Democratic Party has become a coalition of two major groups representing the tails of the distribution: high-income urban professionals and low-income minorities. The Republican strongholds are in exurbs, small towns, and the countryside, in the middle of the income scale. Republicans thus dominate where inequality is lower, and Democrats where it is higher. It is a simple, consistent, and compelling pattern.

The implications of this pattern are unfolding across the South and Southwest, where minority populations (especially Hispanics) are growing rapidly, and where cities are gradually coming into a controlling position against the towns and countryside. That is why Arizona and Georgia flipped in 2020, and why Nevada went to the Democrats a few years back.

In Texas, with 38 Electoral College votes – more than Pennsylvania and Michigan together – there has been an inexorable three-point swing toward the Democrats every four years: Obama got 40% in 2012, Clinton got 43% in 2016, and Biden got 46% in 2020.

Republican legislatures, especially in southern and southwestern states, have done the math and are terrified. That is why they have worked to reverse the great ballot-access experiments of 2020. The GOP’s unspoken watchword is: Get American voters back into long lines (without drinking water)! The point is to discourage as many as possible from voting at all.

If Congress now fails to protect voting rights, that strategy may work for a while, especially in the low-turnout mid-term elections this year. And the Democrats may falter for other reasons in 2024. But voter suppression can’t save the Republicans. Voting is a habit, and habits are hard to break. The writing is on the wall.

PRINCETON – The political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis that the post-Cold War world would be defined by a “clash of civilizations” turned out to be off the mark. While there certainly is cleavage and conflict, the cause is a clash of cultures within civilizations. It is this clash that fueled the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Such intra-civilizational clashes ultimately make civilization itself impossible – or at least dysfunctional, as US politics now very much seems to be. From COVID-19 to geopolitics, every issue is now subject to a culture war. A year ago, the increasingly tattered veil of conflict-mitigating political and behavioral norms was ripped away.

Though debates about cultural values are ubiquitous, everyone assumes that his or her own local or national clash is somehow unique, as if Britain and France’s post-imperial hangovers defy comparison or are all that different from America’s own imperial debacle. Are American debates about the legacy of slavery and racial oppression really idiosyncratic? Is the struggle to overcome (or to reassert) national identity really an essentially European phenomenon? In fact, the terms that define these debates are rapidly losing any meaning.

In 1907, the American philosopher William James provoked widespread outrage when he suggested that the validity of an idea can be assessed by the “concrete difference … its being true make[s] in anyone’s actual life.” Referring provocatively to “truth’s cash-value in experiential terms,” he argued that ideas have no innate quality; rather, they must show their worth by being broadly accepted through a general circulation in a marketplace. Writing just after the destructive financial crash of 1907, the philosopher John Grier Hibben excoriated James’s pragmatic argument, warning that its acceptance “would certainly precipitate a panic in the world of our thinking as surely as would a similar demand in the world of finance.” 

This century-old argument is just as current today, now that a sense of panic has become the norm. The financial crisis of 2007-8 was followed by the rise of populism, and then by the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each development has deepened a broader crisis of language and meaning. If financial panics destroy value, then crises of language destroy values.

When people use terms whose meaning they don’t understand, they literally don’t know what they are talking about. This practice has become all too common. Many of the words that we use today are the products of previous upheavals. Capitalism and socialism were adopted in the early nineteenth century to come to terms with the Industrial Revolution. Globalism, geopolitics, and multilateralism gained traction in the early twentieth century to account for imperial great-power politics and World War I. Like viruses, these terms have all mutated since their inception.

For example, capitalism and socialism originally described continually evolving ways of understanding how the world was – or should be – organized. But now they have just become scare words. One’s side in the culture war is determined by whether one is more scared of socialism or capitalism (or iterations such as “hyper-capitalism” or “woke capitalism”).

Capitalism was recognized very early on as a phenomenon that crossed borders, becoming a global reality. Socialism, too, was international, but its realization depended on the character of the state system, which in turn embodied a belief that the nation-state was a normal (and some would argue inevitable) political structure. Thus, national politics and the international phenomena of capitalism and socialism lived in constant tension with each other.

Capitalism began as the description of a system that not only facilitated exchange but commodified more domains of life, thereby breaking down traditional norms and institutions. As more types of things came to be exchanged, capitalism as an idea became increasingly diffuse, permeating every aspect of individual behavior. Eventually, market principles were applied to dating, spousal choices, sports management, cultural production, and so on. Everything looked as if it had a financial equivalent.

Adding to its contemporary meaninglessness, capitalism is full of paradoxes. The system relies on decentralized decision-making, but as capital becomes more concentrated, decisions increasingly emanate from just a few central nodes. That opens the way to planning, with Facebook and Google taking the place of old socialist state authorities in shaping our behavior and economic actions. Neither arrangement is really controlled by individual choices or by representative institutions.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the terms of every political debate were set by four binary choices: globalization versus the nation-state; capitalism versus socialism; technocracy versus populism; and multilateralism versus geopolitics. These debates are now outdated. In each case, there is a glaring need for different options.

Adding the “post-” prefix helps somewhat. Post-globalization is more apt than deglobalization, and post-capitalism may be a good way of framing the solution to overly concentrated capital. Post-socialism may offer a way around the limits of the nation-state, which were inherent in traditional socialism. Post-populist could empower the people without relying on the destructive and surreal notion of “the real people” (as if some people are unreal). In each case, a “post-” society requires a new set of terms.

Today’s uncertainties about meaning have become an obstacle to productive debate, not to mention basic logic. We need an intellectual decluttering. The minimalist lifestyle guru Marie Kondo recommends discarding anything that no longer “sparks joy.” Her approach has prompted families to sift through and cast away the detritus left by previous generations.

That is not a bad idea for improving our intellectual hygiene. In place of an attic cleanup would be a debate to identify defunct concepts. The goal would be to make room for new ideas – a reality makeover. Culture wars feed on old, empty nostrums. To stop the useless fighting, we need to discard anything that does not spark creativity.