Note: Behind the green door is the final review of and commented upon the Planet of the Apes franchise, a post about roots and leaves and the Sunday podcast, which was all about the Trump trial. Subscribe here or here.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

One way of thinking about our socio-political system is to imagine a Protestant minister who had a vision of some sort. Maybe he got a glimpse of a dreadful future or perhaps a new path to enlightenment. He then sets about telling everyone he can find about his vision and what he thinks it means. Of course, he just assumes his vision requires him to tell the world about that vision and what it means. No one ever has a vision that requires them to keep quiet about it.

Now, imagine hundreds of such people working in the institutions having hundreds of these visions. Instead of one eccentric minister claiming to have received a message from God, it is hundreds of mediocrities working in offices around the country claiming to have found some new bogeyman or maybe some new path to the assumed end point of human existence. Every day is spent hashing out these visions in the marketplace of visions and visionaries.

This sounds a bit wacky but consider the fact that it is rare to see a product sold on its features and benefits. Even the most mundane products are sold based on their alleged benefit to some cause or your moral benefit. No event is just presented as it is, but instead it is cast as part of a morality tale. A person cannot simply be famous for something like kicking a ball around or singing a song. Instead, he must claim that his fame is in service to a cause.

In all of this is the turmoil of competing revelations. June is now called “pride month” for things that up until recently did not exist. There have always been male and female homosexuals, of course, but their private acts were kept private. The concept of “coming out” is a novelty that brings with it normative claims. Somewhere, someone had a vision that said the path to the promised land is through elevating this tiny minority to the top of the social order.

The market for visions and visionaries is like all other markets, so it did not take long before imitators were on the scene. Lesbian and gay, the L and G of the now famous initialism has been joined by Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual and other, which gets the plus sign for some reason. It turns out that the commodification of sexual deviance has its limits. The next guy or gal with a sexual vision will be stuck with the plus sign.

While much of this stuff seems novel, and much of it is recently invented, the practice of inventing new normative claims is not new. We see it with the various alien bogeymen conjured over the last three decades. The Muslims could not be left to be Muslims in their own lands. They had to submit to this thing called liberal democracy, a thing that does not exist, but when it did exist, it prohibited the imposition of alien socio-political forms on people who rejected them.

Think back to the Bush years and the crusades against the Muslims sounded like Protestant ministers talking about converting the savages. As if my magic, everyone in Washington got it into their heads that the world was at risk unless the Muslims accepted liberal democracy. Put another way, someone, or a group of someone’s, had this revelation and convinced the rest that it was true. Those who did not accept it as a revelation were packed off to the outer darkness.

We now hear the same sorts of sermons about the Russians, except this time the doubters are accused of cavorting with Old Scratch. Suddenly, all the best people are filled with righteous anger at Russia and determined to defeat this enemy in a holy crusade called Project Ukraine. Next up is China, a country all of these people admired until they started having visions about China doing bad things. The gods have spoken and now it is time to act.

The origin of this crusader mindset can be dated to the abolitionist movement when all of a sudden, northern Protestants decided that slavery was a sin, even though Scripture seems to be fine with slavery. Not only was slavery a sin, but the slaver was an irredeemable sinner, and he must be destroyed. Why all of a sudden did masses of people have this shared vision? No one knows because no one asks, just as no one asks why all the best people now say “Keev.”

That is the other feature of the revelation state. Once the vision finds a market, no one bothers to question it. In the revelation state, novel moral claims go from inconceivably strange to irrefutably true in the blink of an eye. Homosexual marriage is the best example of how a joke became holy writ overnight. No one ever asked how this happened as to do so could suggest it does not belong in the catechism, which is a good way to get hurled into the void.

That is another feature of our socio-political system. It demands total, unconditional submission to its moral claims. It is never enough to agree on most things or be indifferent to some things. You are either one hundred percent in tune with the prevailing morality or you face annihilation. The sinners are forced to confess their sins, but always face punishment, no matter how much they grovel. Absolution is arbitrary, but confession is mandatory.

This revelatory aspect of the American ruling class does not explain everything, but it is one aspect of the system. The socio-political system that emerged after Gettysburg was built on the pre-ideological fanaticism that animated abolitionism. In time it seems to have become an ideology all its own. For most of the 20th century it was held in check by practical necessity, but now it has been unleashed and the result is decades of increasingly deranged revelations.

What we may be seeing is the end of a long sociological arc that began in the 19th century with the Great Awakening. Lots of pundits have compared the present to past Protestant fervors, but they snicker in their sleeve and move on. Instead, what we may be witnessing is not echoes of the past but the final end point of a trend that started in that period, mutated along the way into the final virus we see today. The revelatory state may be the logical end point of the Great Awakening.

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