It was sometime around 2006 or 2007, while I was teaching at Georgetown University, that I began reading Berry in earnest: his elegies for what his native Kentucky, and America, had lost in the bargain of industrial development; and how to win some of it back. I had encountered his work in passing during graduate school, as far back as the 1980s, but I wasn’t yet the person, or hadn’t yet ripened into the situation, to receive those words in the way they would hold and haunt me roughly 20 years later.

My intense attraction to Berry’s writing owed to a combination of living a low-grade unhappy existence while raising a young family in and around Washington, DC, and broader political, social, and economic conditions in the early 21st century. While I can today more clearly differentiate between those two factors, at the time they seemed inextricably combined. Our harried life — and the economic and political ecosystem that bred it, so evident in DC — seemed altogether unsustainable. Collectively, we were burning too much fuel; our empire was too far flung; we were individually and collectively too indebted; our politics was too false and performative; our technology already was threatening to undermine good childrearing; and, to top it off, my own life was too fragmented, lived partly in a DC suburb, partly on a campus where the faculty barely knew each other, and partly on congested roads between these two places that didn’t seem altogether real. At that point, Berry’s work was simultaneously an indictment and a lifeline.

Early in 2009, I, along with a small group of friends who felt similarly beset, established the online journal Front Porch Republic, a publication inspired by Berry’s vision of a more integrated, rooted, genuine, frugal, and modest life lived in a nation that mirrored these commitments. The publication became prominent enough to receive both praise and denunciation, the latter especially by those who thought that Berry (and all of us) were full of sanctimony but short on realism and practical solutions to the crises we lamented.

While the authors at Front Porch Republic riffed on Berry’s recurring themes of home, community, limits, rootedness, and local liberty with concomitant stewardship, most of us recognized the lacuna between what we wrote and how we lived, a gap that underscored the power — but also the distant purity — of Berry’s witness. 

It wasn’t just the haunting beauty of Berry’s writing that appealed to so many of us; it was the apparent seamlessness of what he wrote and how he lived his life: farming the same hillside that his family had stewarded for generations. The more the small group of us wrote of the natural fittingness of localism, small scale, community, and generational continuity, the more the daily practices of much of our lives stood as an accusation against our words. 

Like several of my fellow “Porchers,” I sought a change, one that eventually led me to seek another academic position outside the imperial city. In 2012, I packed up our now-not-quite-so-young family for the Rust Belt and surrounding cornfields of South Bend and Notre Dame. There, and still, we own a historic home a short walk to campus, surrounded and known by neighbors who are also professors, fellow parishioners, and people of local renown. I’m certain that had I not been reading Berry during those years, I would likely still be a trebuchet’s fling from the White House and perhaps even wielding the influence that is often ironically attributed to me. Instead, I revel in a yard that is effectively an extension of campus, and have burrowed my way into a thick network of overlapping friendships.

It’s difficult to say what might have happened to me and to our family had we remained, but today, our sons have since twice-over made us grandparents. All of our children have stayed local by American standards, living reasonably nearby in the Indianapolis area with jobs that don’t implicate them deeply in the imperial project. On a purely personal level, I can’t imagine a better outcome — and why I say that I owe Berry this life.

Yet since then, the wider social, political, technological, and economic landscape — the one I apparently escaped — has, if anything, gotten worse. We are more disconnected than ever. Our politics seems not just broken, but shattered. Our economy is teetering on collapse. We are technologically on the verge of the very opposite condition of humane engagement in our work that Berry commended, not only eschewing labor with our hands, but increasingly relying on machines to do our thinking, too. More bombs are exploding around the world than any time in most of our lifetimes, with the potential not only for a world war, but a nuclear apocalypse, drawing nearer than ever. The idea that one could escape these deepening pathologies was always a pleasant delusion.

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While it may be self-indulgent for me to speak of Berry through the prism of my own experience, it is, in fact, a very Berryean engagement. Much of the appeal of his writing lay in the challenge of living up to his example. I suspect that my own experience of Berry’s influence may be representative. His writing played an immense role in choices made by me and my wife that improved our family and communal life. But those improvements have taken place in a world that — at least, by Berry’s standards — has considerably darkened, a world worming its way to catastrophe. 

How, then, should we assess the work and life of such a remarkably influential and yet ineffectual figure?

Hours after Wendell Berry died, my social-media timeline was full of anecdotes about the man and eloquent quotes from his writing. The irony wasn’t lost on me and, I suspect, many others: so many who credit Berry with shaping their worldview and their way of life were posting their testimonies online. These testimonies rose from keyboards and smartphone screens into a virtual realm that Berry himself famously shunned.

Among the essays for which Berry was most famous was a 1987 Harper’s Magazine article headlined “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” Berry’s Luddite antipathy to modern machinery, especially the gnostic features of modern computing, was as widely reviled as admired. As he counseled in his poem “How to be a Poet,”

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensioned life;

stay away from screens.

As I write this in my air-conditioned house on a scorching humid late-summer day, on the latest version of an Apple MacBook Air, occasionally checking my email and social-media feed, I simultaneously agree in principle with Berry, even as I recognize that his Luddite ways aren’t for me. Those who expressed their admiration for Berry on similar devices thus implicitly acknowledged the limitations of his public witness.

If pressed, most would acknowledge the pressure of undeniable reality: we live in a modern world, and it’s nearly impossible to live without what have become its attendant necessities: electricity, mechanization, nuclear energy, drone warfare, internal combustion engines, air travel, computers, internet, suburbs, finance, even globalization to some extent. And therein lies the rub for the legion of Wendell admirers: most of us simply can’t, and certainly won’t, follow Wendell’s footsteps into agrarian simplicity and even primitivism. 

We may harbor a romantic streak against the machine, but most of us live in “the real world.” Many readers who admire his words have sought to emulate his example up to a point, but most — all but a very few, like the Paul Kingsnorths of the world (and even he will take a plane to give a talk at a Front Porch Republic conference) — simply acknowledge that modernity has its own logic and demands.

How, then, to “be like Wendell”? In the Aughts, especially, there was a palpable shift in the conservative world toward what Rod Dreher coined as “the Benedict Option.” Young traditionalist intellectuals (and older ones, like myself) increasingly condemned the failed “conservatism” that ran from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, pointing to the ways that Milton Friedman-inspired free-market economics and uniparty liberal imperialism ended up undermining the stable conditions necessary for the flourishing of traditional ways of life. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, most conservatives saw little hope for a political reversal, now faced with a hostile anti-religious ruling class. The existing conservative settlement looked like just another iteration of progressive liberalism, only with a slightly lower speed limit.

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Recognizing such daunting obstacles to ideals of civic virtue, economic localism, and republican care for the home front, politically difficult-to-classify figures who called for an increasingly anti-political “retreat” rose to prominence. On the academic side, there were the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and David L. Schindler. More accessibly, Wendell Berry loomed large. And even more popularly, there was Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, published as a book in 2006, his various blogs, and, a decade later, The Benedict Option. My own book Why Liberalism Failed appeared against this backdrop and concluded with a reiteration of localism amid the wreckage.

Seemingly a rejection of the Republican Party Reaganism, “the Benedict Option” and similar projects were, in fact, Reaganism’s mirror image: an anti-government, anti-political stance that strove not to reduce the size of government through electoral victories, much less to orient the government toward the common good, but to pay government no mind at all. Instead, the focus was on living locally, being communal, attending to one’s church and family, and seeking as high a degree of personal integrity amid the temptations of modernity.

Yet as the Obama years unfolded, misgivings began to grow: would the government leave the “crunchy” traditionalists alone? Would conservative churches be allowed to step away from the culture wars, attending mainly to their flock while eschewing the political melee? Would traditional peoples who sought to cultivate their own gardens escape the apparently encompassing and inescapable logic of modernity?

Dreher’s Benedict Option — relying heavily on Berryean themes — was written in expectation of a Hillary Clinton victory and set out to provide a strategic roadmap for a lengthy period of likely political oppression. (That book was more or less rewritten for the Biden years, under the title Live Not By Lies, which, predictably, sold much better). 

Yet actual rural America — Berry’s fellow Kentuckians, if not his readers, who generally deplored Trump and still do — had other ideas. They supported a political alternative: fight the oppressive progressivism not by retreat to crunchy enclaves, but rather forcibly take over the machinery of the federal government and advance policy that might advantage those whom modernity had sought to discard. 

Berry’s appeal, once appearing inevitable, palpably fell off, as the energy among conservatives moved instead to debates over not whether, but how, to deploy the levers of government to advance conservative ends.

Yet even this new project — a populism comfortable with the use of state power — is now in tatters. At least for the time being. The Trump era is beginning to wind down. The denouement is accompanied by a worsening of the undisciplined and even disastrous policy decisions — and the attendant increase of diversionary “trolling” — that were so evident in Trump’s first term. Thus, the attention now being paid to Berry’s work amid his passing seems oddly less than coincidental. Many are likely to conclude that, whatever the limits of our ability to pursue “the Berry Option,” there is no real choice but to seek to preserve our shrinking enclaves.

Then again, this was all along a misreading of Berry — or at least, a partial and pinched reading. One driven to a significant extent by a particular set of political and social conditions in the Aughts and 2010s, an echo of deep-seated conservative beliefs that politics seem to hold nothing but a worsening of all the modern perils that Berry warned against and lived in opposition to.

Berry could and often was contemptuous of political figures. In one of his most famous poems, “The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front,” he wrote the oft-quoted lines:

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

In Port William — the fictional Kentucky town that formed the setting of nearly all his fiction — there appears to be little, if any, need for politics. The “membership” is largely governed by custom and affection, and what politics there is comes at the intervention of distant warmakers, meddlers, and the collusion of national politicians and absentee economic overlords. A strong anarchist streak marks Berry’s thinking.

However, that is not the sum and total of his thought. He understood that the old ways wouldn’t easily survive in modern times; to defend what was being destroyed, and even approximate what might not be simply revived, would often require the support of more distant (if difficult-to-realize) political action. While many of Berry’s admirers were likely to embrace the mantra “politics is downstream of culture,” Berry himself knew such a stance was a dangerous oversimplification. Farmers with dirty hands couldn’t afford such purity.

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Two examples come to mind. First, there is Berry’s depiction of an older, vibrant economic localism in a nearby town to his own, New Castle, Ky. That vibrancy, however, is illegible without accounting for what it took to defend it in relatively modern times — and still, only for a while, only provisionally. The upshot is that Berry recognized the ways in which local culture was decidedly downstream of politics. As recounted in his essay “Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend,” included in his 2017 book The Art of Loading Brush, Berry enumerates the local offerings of New Castle of 80 years ago.

Permit me to quote at some length: “In those days New Castle was self-assured, as no small rural town can be today. It was advertising itself as a place to come for needed goods and services. Here is what it had to offer: 4 grocery stores, 2 dry goods stores, 2 jewelry stores, 1 hardware store, 1 hardware and novelty store, 5 garages and filling stations, 1 seed store, 2 coal dealers who also offered livestock feed and general hauling, 1 shoe repair shop, 2 cream stations (where farmers sold their cream), 1 appliance shop, 2 barber shops, 2 beauty shops, 1 hatchery, 5 doctors (who made house calls), 1 veterinarian, 1 drugstore, 1 restaurant, 1 hotel, 1 tourist court (“modern log cabins”), 2 funeral homes, 2 blacksmith shops, 1 newspaper and job printing shop, 1 pool parlor, 5 lawyers, 1 bank, 6 insurance agents. That is 55 stores, shops, trades, and services….”

He concluded: “New Castle was a lively place in 1946, commercially and socially….  [Moreover], virtually all of its varied and thriving economic life in 1946 rested upon the farms and farm households that surrounded it.”

While America was still considerably rural in the mid-20th century, already for decades urbanizing forces were at play. Somewhat later in that same essay, Berry explained how the rural community was able to remain vibrant well into the midcentury: the local farm cooperative was only able to succeed due to “the New Deal’s tobacco program, when a government loan ‘against a crop’ made it possible for a regional grower’s association to buy, store, and resell any tobacco that did not bring the support price, and to pay the grower at the warehouse. The Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association … [kept] many thousands of farmers at work and decently paid for more than sixty years.” And it was during those years, thanks to the assistance of a more distant government, that localism thrived.

What destroyed that vibrant and free (if indirectly subsidized) market of local businesses? Its destruction occurred quickly when that same federal government retreated and allowed large-scale economic powers (cheered by lucre-driven politicians) to consolidate, eliminate inefficiencies, and steamroll a way of life in the name of progress and plenty. “Republican corporate Christian capitalists” endorsed a laissez-faire policy of “get big or get out,” while “liberals and Democrats” adopted “a policy of neglect, of not-thinking, of faith in technology.” The result can be seen all over the nation’s rural towns and small cities like New Castle: blighted downtowns with vape (or pot) shops, Dollar General stores, and maybe — if the town is lucky — a grimy Chinese restaurant.

Berry, in other words, understood that healthy local communities could only be revived and thereafter flourish in a nation oriented to a necessary long-term vision of husbandry, stewardship, and local culture. Beginning in 2009, along with his friend Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, Berry called for a “50-year Farm Bill” that would move national agricultural policy away from fixed monocultures conducive to large-scale mechanized farming, and shift instead to prioritizing a variety of perennial crops that would encourage smaller-scale farming and an attendant local culture like the one the author described in his 2017 essay. 

Relying simply on “the market” wouldn’t incentivize the long-term mentality necessary to resist quick-profit, extractive forms of farming. Nor can the “self-regulating” market account for the long-term costs in erosion and soil depletion, not to mention the ongoing destruction of vibrant local cultures. Interestingly, then, in the very span of time that Berry’s writings inspired an increasingly apolitical stance among disillusioned conservatives, Berry was proposing a way of moving beyond the increasingly mindless dichotomy of “government versus localism” and seeking ways to depict a mutually beneficial relationship between the two. 

This was not to say that Berry was naïve to the ways that centralized government could, and often did, act contrary to the interests of local communities. But in his words and actions, Berry underscored that the values he extolled would require a political dimension in addition to the always inspiring, sometimes impossible call to live intentionally, with greater care for our local places and communities.

Berry, then, still has much to teach even his admirers, especially those rightly disillusioned with our politics of the past half-century. Living locally — even leaving DC — is in many ways an improvement. But it won’t suffice if the nation’s decisions effectively destroy the places worth living in. Without minimizing the Mad Farmer’s insistence that we “denounce the government,” we should also recall what follows: “Embrace the flag. Hope to live in the free republic for which it stands.” Though his pen is now still — and I pray on the other side once again to hear his loud unrestrained guffaw at a ribald joke — here and now we should strive to take the full measure of what he tried to teach us, and would teach us still.

But they protest too much, these Hollywood liberals. In terms of end-product, Hollywood is the propaganda factory of American conservatism. Periodically, some opinionator will complain that the right-wing point of view is censored, barred, banned in popular culture today — perhaps pointing to some (largely market-driven) decision to cast a non-white lead in a superhero franchise, or some bit of awards ceremony handwringing. The counter-evidence would be: Fast & Furious 9, Toy Story 4, Avengers: Endgame, The Star Wars saga, Die Hard, Rocky I-V, Wonder Woman, Working Girl. Every western, every war movie, every film in which a determined individual rises above a mediocre/corrupt/unbelieving collective to impose their will upon their fate — usually with some homilies about the importance of family, an insistence on absolute Truth, and a bit of ultra-violence along the way.

Ron Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy — streaming on Netflix from Tuesday — is quintessential. It’s the sentimental tale of a bright kid from a bad town who lifts himself, by his bootstraps, no less, to personal success. In her role as “Mamaw”, the foul-mouthed heart-of-gold Appalachian matriarch, Glenn Close even commits to wearing bad teeth — which means she is now seen as a dead cert for an Oscar nod. In fact, the only thing that distinguishes Hillbilly Elegy from basic Hollywood fare, other than its off-the-charts Ron Howardian mawkishness, is that its source material is explicit in its conservatism. For the real-life Vance is a proud representative of the white working class, who once described Donald Trump’s message as “an oasis in the desert” for his people.

Back in the 1960s, Vance’s hillbilly grandparents (Mamaw and Papaw), became internal immigrants, moving 100 miles from rural Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, in search of work at the Armco steelworks. Even when work was plentiful, violence, alcoholism and a general cussedness were features of daily life. When the jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 80s, poverty, drugs and despair were added to the mix. But one child believed… and Vance made it out, first becoming a Marine, then a Yale Law School graduate, then a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, then a bestselling author at 31.

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Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t mention Trump — but the timing was apt. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Vance was presented as a sentinel of not only the hillbillies (whom he describes as his people; quite specifically Scots-Irish farmers who settled in the Appalachians), but also the white working class en masse.

“You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading JD Vance,” wrote Rod Dreher in an interview that crashed the American Conservative website. “His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.”

So Hillbilly Elegy became a set text for modern conservatives, the book that — as a commenter on the Times website recently put it — “explains exactly why Trump was needed and is still needed”. Vance toured the news channels as a sort of thinking person’s deplorable and helped reframe identity politics for the only minority in America (as Mamaw had taught him) whom it was socially acceptable to insult. And for liberals, back in 2016, reading Hillbilly Elegy became an act of imaginative penance.

The book is deeply moving. Vance writes with clarity and empathy and captures, as few are able, the experience of family dysfunction from the perspective of a child. You cannot help but root for him — and wince at the bloody noses and black eyes, the Pepsi that his mother put in his bottle from nine months, the dim comments from the privileged people he meets when he finally breaks into those elite coastal enclaves. Hell of a family, the Vances. Mamaw literally set fire to her husband as a punishment for falling asleep drunk on the sofa — and she was the stable one. Vance’s father abandoned the family to become a Christian fundamentalist; 15 stepfathers came and went. When JD was 11, his drug-dependent mother (Amy Adams in the movie) lost her temper while driving and floored the accelerator, threatening to kill them both. When the case eventually arrives before a family court, JD looks around and realises that all the other families look like his.

The scene is presented a little differently in the film, but in the book it’s where the personal becomes political. “They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed ‘TV accents’ — the neutral accent that so many news anchors had, the social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.”

But having written about the litany of failures in education, healthcare, the labour market, the justice system and wider American culture, Vance makes a fairly unconvincing turn. I read hoping to find out what lies beyond terms like “white trash”; Vance seemed to be saying to me — yeah, we are kind of trash. The fact that Vance is honest about his conflicted feelings doesn’t really help to iron them out. He sets great store by “hillbilly justice” (i.e. pointing guns at family members) — which “never failed me”. But he also wonders. If family honour is so important in his community, why are domestic abuse and family breakdown so rampant? If hillbillies are so hardworking, why do we give up on good jobs and moan about the economy on Facebook? And despite his purported pride in his people, he proves deeply resentful when any of his peers receive any crumbs of his success.

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It would be inaccurate to characterise Vance as a cheerleader for Trump. He’s actually smarter than that. In his interview with Dreher, Vance warned — prophetically — that while Trumpism offered a cheap thrill, the man himself offered nothing to treat the root causes of American despair. He’s the OxyContin of Presidents. At best, he made people understand that their pain was economic as much as cultural. But Vance’s real disappointment with Trump — “the tragedy of his presidency” — is that he encouraged white working class voters to blame others for their problems.

The book turns out to be rather more old-fashioned: a diatribe against what Vance terms “learned helplessness”. Its broadsides at “welfare queens” have been mainstream in American politics since at least the Nixon era (when they were commonly directed against African-Americans). And its celebration of individual uplift is pure Hollywood. If he could change one thing about his community, Vance says, it’s the feeling people have that their choices don’t matter. They do — I am living proof of that, he says. “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”

Well, sure. We all need to feel that our choices matter. But the fact that Vance only made it out by the skin of his teeth — and hillbilly VCs remain a rare breed — suggests that merely exhorting the people of Middletown, Ohio, to make better choices isn’t going to do much. As his book makes clear, a poor kid only needs to make a handful of bad choices to fail and 100 good choices to become a success. The opposite is true for rich kids: three of four decent choices all-but guarantee success; you need to continually mess up to truly mess up.

Instead of questioning the nature of those choices, Vance doubles down on those who made bad choices. That is, who lack his combination of intelligence; a hard-as-nails Mamaw; Amy Chua — the actual Tiger Mom of legend — stepping in as his mentor; and so on. Luck in other words. You need luck. Can’t we do better than luck?

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The part that conservatives often quote with a triumphal “YOU SEE?” is where Vance dismisses naive attempts to improve his people’s lot through education — despite the fact that education provided his own route out. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.’”

But that’s not the end of the conversation. It’s the beginning. OK, so what can be done to improve parenting? Infrastructure investment, job creation, paid parental leave, basic healthcare, nutrition programs, wage protection, income support? The sort of protections that American politicians have systematically dismantled over the last 40 years or so? Might be worth a try? And maybe a problem like the opioid epidemic was created by governments and corporations. This isn’t to deny the agency of Vance’s mother, who fell prey to heroin-addiction. It’s merely to admit that fixing it might involve more than just telling people to make less trashy choices. It may not turn wolves into lambs. But it might save a lot of kids unnecessary pain.

The message I took from the book was rather darker than the one that Vance purports to offer. What he seemed to be saying is: these people neither want nor deserve your sympathy or your help. And what a comforting message that must be for those who have outsourced jobs, dismantled social security and widened the economic divide over the years. And there’s a further implication too. These opiate-ridden post-industrial communities may hate big city liberals; but not nearly as much as they hate Billy down the road, who cheats on his food stamps; or Marcie next door, who has five kids by five different fathers; or Duane who pulled his gun on his wife in the restaurant.

It’s hopelessness internalised. Easy to stir up if you’re a cynical enough politician. It’s often forgotten that Tories only really started making in-roads in the “Red Wall” towns not with Brexit but with George Osborne’s “Skivers vs Strivers” speeches circa 2013 which went down a storm in post-industrial British towns.

As for the movie. I suspect conservatives will hate it as it does that thing Didion describes, of pretending irreconcilable political differences don’t exist. Liberals will hate it too as it does  that “sickeningly irresponsible” thing (as one review had it) of asking audiences to sympathise with a conservative. But let’s not pretend its combination of schmaltz and violence, of myth and identity is anything other than purest Hollywood, the absolute mainstream of American culture. It’s the water and we are fish — we don’t even notice it.

Days later, it was reported that the Metropolitan Police were investigating Darren Grimes, the Conservative activist, because of a racially insensitive remark made by Professor David Starkey during an interview on Mr Grimes’ YouTube channel at the end of June.

In the United States, meanwhile, the company Yelp, whose website features crowd-sourced reviews of millions of businesses, announced that they were introducing a new feature on their website: a “Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert,” which will be accompanied by “a link to a news article where they can learn more about the incident.”

All of these stories broke while I was reading Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents. These were immediately followed by two further developments from the other side of the Atlantic. First, Webster’s online dictionary responded to a manufactured row over Amy Coney Barrett’s use of the phrase “sexual preference” by changing the entry for the word “preference” to state that it was an “offensive” term when used in connection with sexual orientation.

On the very same day it became clear that Twitter was refusing to publish any Tweet linking to a story in the New York Post concerning corruption allegations against Hunter Biden, son of the US Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

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All of these occurrences illustrate Dreher’s central thesis: that inhabitants of Western countries are seeing the development of a new soft totalitarianism. Under this dispensation, interpersonal freedoms — those related to sexual expression and sexual self-definition, to the actualisation of a Self created by an individual for themselves — are sacrosanct, whereas old-fashioned concrete liberties of speech and thought and assembly and debate, are up for grabs. This is Philip Rieff’s “triumph of the therapeutic”, where the state will protect us from disapproval, challenge and criticism — even if that requires the destruction of proper freedoms.

Dreher quotes Hannah Arendt’s definition of a totalitarian society as “one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under the control of that ideology”. This can be distinguished from authoritarianism, where a state aims to monopolise political control but does not seek a more thoroughgoing and intrusive transformation in its citizens’ worldviews and habits of mind.

Many people will raise a sceptical eyebrow at this. As with Dreher’s last book The Benedict Option — to which Live Not By Lies is a sequel, or companion piece, of sorts — there have already been accusations of paranoia and alarmism. However, the evidence he marshals is compelling and hard to rebut, and any intelligent and honest observer of current affairs will find it hard to deny that in Western countries the list of things that simply cannot be said without provoking a possibly career-ending storm of controversy and denunciation is growing by the day.

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A problem for people like Dreher who wish to sound the alarm about soft totalitarianism — and a useful rhetorical tool for their critics — is that the phenomenon is not always clearly defined. There is no party whose programme explicitly outlines their support for it (although of course it has the implicit support of most mainstream parties in Western countries). It has never been put to any electorate. There is no Mein Kampf or Little Red Book for this movement, if indeed it can be described as a movement at all. It is hard to define and hard to pin down, despite its vast power.

Various attempts have been made at description. “Political correctness” was popular for a while, but suffered the terrible fate of many terms coined to describe Left-wing censoriousness: it quickly became low-status, endlessly mocked by cultural gatekeepers. Nowadays we have “cancel culture”, which is a useful term without quite capturing the way in which soft totalitarianism works. The writer Dan Hitchens calls it The Thing; the US intellectual James Poulos calls it “the pink police state”. In some internet circles the loose and informal but extremely powerful alliance between the media, academia, the public sector and the political Left — which polices and dictates the parameters of acceptable opinion — is known as The Cathedral.

Terminology per se is perhaps less important than a clear understanding of what exactly “soft totalitarianism” means. It can be best defined, I think, as a legal and cultural regime in which the expression of morally and socially conservative ideas and opinions is aggressively policed and punished by a combination of legal and social sanctions, backed up by corporate power.

The deepest animating impulse of what writer Wesley Yang calls the Successor Ideology is a ferocious egalitarianism, based on what has been called the “blank slate” view of human nature. This results in a furious hostility to hierarchy, natural distinction, traditional Western cultural norms, or any concept of limits on the perfectibility of human societies. Its most precious taboos are those around ethnic characteristics, sexual expression, relations between the sexes, and comparisons between cultures. The ruling presumption is that differences in outcome are ipso facto evidence of structural injustices.

It has become a cliché of conservative rhetoric to point out that modern progressive belief and activism has many of the characteristics of religious doctrine and ritual. Nevertheless, I do think this is a useful insight, because it helps us to understand what exactly it is that we are dealing with. Contemporary progressive activism resembles religious belief insofar as it provides an all-encompassing epistemological and moral framework into which everything else must be incorporated, and a set of moral standards against which people and their actions and thoughts must be judged.

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By Rod Dreher

This means that it is extremely hostile to the normal business of politics: the consideration of empirical findings about what the world is really like, the recognition of trade-offs, and the necessity of compromise between competing interests. To approach politics with a religious sensibility is dangerous, because it leaves no room for the obvious reality that in political deliberation we must pay attention to people’s differing conceptions of what is good and important in life. The ideologue, of course, will find it hard to admit this fact, because to reckon with it honestly is to reject the totalising, moralistic fervour which is so central to a great deal of progressive politics and activism.

Dreher approaches the problem of the totalising ideology under which we increasingly live from an unexpected angle, in light of the experiences and concerns of people who lived under Communist dictatorship in the Eastern Bloc in the years before 1990. Live Not By Lies features testimony from many such individuals, including some who fled to the United States many years ago and now say they are concerned by the resemblances between the cultural-political atmosphere in the USA and the stifling control they thought they had left behind.

The title of the book refers to a message published by the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the day of his arrest by Soviet authorities in 1974. He had come to realise that one of the most powerful supports for Communist dictatorship came from the willingness of people to passively co-operate with the official lies published by the regime. The propaganda put out by tyrannies is very often not meant to convince people, so much as to humiliate and demoralise them by surrounding them with obvious nonsense that they dare not contradict.

Solzhenitsyn said that you can stand up to this by refusing to co-operate with official dishonesty and deception. He knew that most people cannot be heroic public dissidents, but he did challenge them to live in truth in a small-scale way as far as they were able. He gave several examples of how his readers might do this: avoid speaking lies themselves; leave or boycott meetings where lies are told; refuse to support demonstrations that they do not genuinely believe in.

This way, he argues, you can begin to live with integrity against a regime that tries to make this impossible, and you can strengthen others by your example.

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

The relevance of the imperative to live in truth to our current plight is not hard to see. We too are asked to swallow many lies — not just Christians, to whom Dreher’s book is principally addressed, but cultural and social conservatives of all kinds. In resisting the spread of such lies, we face what game theorists call a co-ordination problem: a situation where lots of people are trying to make decisions about the best way to act based on incomplete information.

Perhaps other people in the meeting also think privilege theory is mostly nonsense, or have read the papers debunking the science behind implicit bias training, or believe that ethnic minorities don’t need to be patronised with special treatment. Maybe all the parents at the school think that six-year-olds shouldn’t be learning about gay marriage and transgenderism. But who is going to dare to say that? Who will speak first? Solzhenitsyn has the antidote; we must speak up, we must be willing to take the risk and bear the cost.

This is easy in theory, and much harder in practice. For many of us resistance in these areas is liable to affect professional advancement and prestige, even our ability to earn a living altogether. It may lead to social ostracism and rifts with family and friends. Equally, we must ask ourselves whether we can live with the alternative, of compliance and endless white lies and ultimately the surrender of all public space to fanatics and those willing to bend to them.

There is a certain bracing comfort in having the choice presented so starkly. Dreher’s book is sobering, and clarifying. As I put it down, some words from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword Of Honour trilogy came to mind: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

Trump, Schama claimed, was occupying the same territory as the French peasants did in 1789: in the summer of that year a Great Fear descended, including a terror of “brigands” working for the aristocracy. The brigands did not actually exist but the fear caused the peasants to organise themselves and become the armed guard of the revolution.

Trump’s brigands — the imaginary men in dark clothes — could be hugely useful, for as Schama put it: “In this case they could be the phalanxes of American counter-revolution — or fascism.” Might this be true?

There has been much chatter about what Donald Trump might do if he were to lose in November. Or, more to the point, what might he do if he wins — or seems to be winning — on the night of the election only to lose when postal votes are counted over the days (or weeks) afterwards? Who knows what his supporters might be capable of?

But there is another question, asked less often but certainly looming in the background this autumn. What would the Democrats and their supporters do if they lost?

Not Joe Biden — we know he’d go quietly. But what about the anti-Trump protesters on the streets of Portland, Oregon, of Seattle, of Chicago, of Washington DC itself. The bandana wearers. The stone throwers. The corner store looters.

Donald Trump’s disinclination to accept defeat is rather well known, but his opponents on the Left are assumed to be hewn from more democratic timber. For all the complaints about Russian interference and other criminality, they sucked it up in 2016.Would they, again?

It has to be an open question. It may become — if Trump hauls himself out of the electoral mess he is in — a central question, on which the future of America hinges, and polling does not lead to optimism: already 28% of Biden supporters say they will not accept a Trump victory as fair and accurate, compared to 19% of Trump voters.

The forces of the American Left are not controlled by shadowy figures in dark clothes, but they are organised and angry in a way that they have not been in recent history. So what do they believe is acceptable in the effort to resist Donald Trump, and how far will they go?

More from this author

Will America ever be great again?

By Justin Webb

If you are searching for a view of the intellectual and moral slack the American far-Left is cutting itself, look no further than gentle old National Public Radio. More than a decade ago, when I lived in the US, NPR was genially Left-of-centre, but not aggressively so. Last week it revealed itself to be — in the eyes of many Americans — quite unhinged, publishing an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of a book called In Defense of Looting.

Osterweil made two assertions, the first being that looting is justified because it attacks the idea of private property and the world of work: “So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

The second is that stealing from shops is part of the wider movement for change in America: “Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police,” she said: “It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”

None of this is robustly challenged, and this was not some sociology professor playing with edgy thoughts on campus — it was an interview conducted and disseminated by one of the most important mainstream broadcasters in the USA, a non-profit devoted to ideals of impartiality and truth.

It is fair to consider at least the possibility that the interview is evidence that something has snapped. In NPR, as in other places where Left-wing thought is explored (and used to be challenged), it has become acceptable to treat looting with respect. In fact it has become necessary, part of the struggle for racial justice. So, in the event of a Trump victory, what actions would be seen as proportionate and reasonable on the Left?

We do not really know any more; what we do know is that Joe Biden’s denunciation of violence — unequivocal and heartfelt and sympathetically reported by most of the media — is not regarded as wise or just by large segments of his supporters.

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Is Trump about to quit?

By Justin Webb

The writer Elie Mystal — the Harvard-educated Justice Correspondent for the The Nation, the oldest weekly magazine in America and home to the thoughtful centre-Left — had this to say about calls for restraint and non-violence: “Now comes the part where white people abandon us. Now comes the part where the white majority impatiently demands a return to normalcy. Now comes the part where white people say, ‘I believe that Black Lives Matter, but…’”

Mystal concludes: “I knew a majority of white people would revert to form and regress to their mean, because a majority of white people were always going to value their own comfort over justice for Black people.”

Again: never mind whether Biden is right or wrong. What does he do, what does he say, what is the deal on the streets, if Trump gets four more years? Will they accept Biden-style calls for restraint? Or is the wider movement too far gone, too hooked on the idea that oppression justifies radical change?

Suggested reading

How the Trumps silence their women

By Tanya Gold

The conservative author Rod Dreher last week tweeted a screen-shot of an online town hall meeting organised by the Northwestern University Law faculty. At the meeting each white faculty member at this hugely prestigious centre of American intellectual excellence begins with a self-denunciation. “I’m Jim Speta. And I am a racist,” the interim dean of the School says in the meeting chat thread leaked to Dreher. “My name is Emily Mullin. I am a racist and a gatekeeper of white supremacy. I will work to be better,” wrote another distinguished legal scholar. What might Emily Mullin’s work look like in the aftermath of a Trump victory?

When a political movement has gone so far as to instigate self-denouncing sessions, how could it accept victory by an opponent whose win can only be evidence of white supremacy? And will it be acceptable for white people who regard themselves as progressive to keep off the streets or to support the police as they try to protect the mainly poor people whose livelihoods go up in smoke when rioters come to town?

In 2016, plenty of people who hated his guts and feared greatly for the future of America, and believed that Hillary Clinton had been traduced and that the Russians had helped the Republicans, nonetheless said words to the effect of “Trump won the electoral college but not the popular vote but that is our system and I am sticking to it.”

That could be a “problematic” view in the event of a Trump victory this year. The word resistance, used loosely during the last four years, may take on a sharper and more dangerous meaning.