In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right about human nature, the Republican Party’s internal fights stop looking like arguments over policy and start looking like a contest between a faction built on a false anthropology and a faction built on a true one.
Start with fusionism. The Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, traditional values, and anticommunism rested on the individualist picture Mearsheimer rejects. Its economic wing treated the voter as a rational actor who responds to incentives, calculates his tax burden, and wants government out of the way so he can flourish alone. Paul Ryan (b. 1970) was the purest expression of this. He offered entitlement reform, dynamic scoring, and opportunity-society rhetoric to an electorate that, on Mearsheimer’s account, never wanted any of it, because people do not experience themselves as atomistic actors maximizing utility. They experience themselves as members of groups under threat or in decline. The base’s indifference to the donor-class agenda, visible since at least 2012 and undeniable after 2016, follows from his premises. Libertarianism within the GOP becomes a doctrine for the small minority of men whose temperament lets them feel like lone wolves, funded by a donor class whose interests it serves, and structurally incapable of winning mass loyalty.
The faction Mearsheimer’s anthropology vindicates is national conservatism. Donald Trump (b. 1946) grasped by instinct what Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), and JD Vance (b. 1984) argue in books: the nation is the largest tribe that works. Mearsheimer says in The Great Delusion that when nationalism and liberalism collide, nationalism almost always wins. If so, the populist turn is a correction toward reality, and the party’s older establishment was the delusion. Immigration becomes the central issue under this reading because it concerns the boundary of the group, and boundary questions arouse the deepest sentiments humans have. The establishment treated immigration as an economic question with a clear answer. The base treated it as a question about who we are. Mearsheimer’s premises say the base had the better grasp of what politics is.
His argument cuts hardest on foreign policy, which is the book’s subject. If rights universalism is a philosophical error, then the democracy-promotion wing, the Bush-Cheney-Bolton lineage, was committed to a project that might never have worked: remaking tribal societies in the image of a creed their members never internalized. Afghanistan and Iraq become predictable failures rather than execution problems. The restraint wing of the party, which barely existed in 2003 and now contests for dominance, holds the position his theory endorses. Sovereignty replaces human rights as the organizing vocabulary. The fight between Vance and the remaining Reaganite internationalists over Ukraine is, on these premises, a fight the restrainers should win and probably will.
The religious right gets an unexpected vindication too, though on secular grounds. If socialization beats reason as the source of moral preferences, then whoever controls the institutions of childhood controls the moral future. The school-board fights, the curriculum wars, the battles over what a seven-year-old hears about sex and country and God stop looking like culture-war theater and start looking like the most consequential politics there is. Mearsheimer’s account implies that conservatives who spent decades fighting over marginal tax rates while progressives captured education made a catastrophic allocation of effort. The value infusion happens before the reasoning faculties mature. The side that performs the infusion wins, a generation later, regardless of who wins the arguments.
For practices, the implications are uncomfortable for anyone who likes deliberative politics. If reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, persuasion through argument converts almost no one. Mobilization beats persuasion. Loyalty signals beat white papers. The rally, the flag, the enemy, the grievance, these work because they engage the tribal endowment. Trump’s style is, on this reading, a more accurate political technology than the think-tank style it displaced. The party’s drift toward loyalty tests and primary purges follows the same logic: tribes police defection because defection threatens survival, and a party that behaves like a tribe will punish heretics more harshly than incompetents.
Governance is where it gets dangerous, and where Mearsheimer himself might caution the GOP against over-reading him. He is no postliberal at home. His argument for liberalism is that people will never agree on first principles, that such disagreements turn lethal, and that liberal tolerance is a survival arrangement, a modus vivendi rather than a truth. A Republican Party that takes his anthropology as license for full tribal rule misreads him. The same premises that explain why nationalism beats liberalism abroad explain why a continental, multiethnic nation needs liberal institutions at home to keep its internal tribes from each other’s throats. The constructive project his theory implies is a thick civic nationalism: build a shared American identity strong enough to function as the tribe, so the smaller tribes within it do not tear the place apart. The destructive temptation his theory also explains is majority-group identity politics, which treats one tribe within the nation as the nation. The first might hold a diverse country together. The second guarantees the conflict it claims to prevent.
So the picture: the donor wing holds the money and a refuted anthropology. The populist wing holds the voters and the correct one, but flirts with conclusions Mearsheimer rejects. The party’s unresolved condition, populists winning the symbolic fights while donors win the legislative ones, persists because the coalition contains both the truth about human nature and the interests that profit from denying it. If Mearsheimer is right, that arrangement is unstable, and the populists hold the high ground, because they are working with the grain of the species.
The Democrats are a buffered leadership sitting on a porous base it can no longer hear. The Republicans are a porous base that captured the party and drove the buffered leadership out.
Start with where the enchanted world survived in America. It survived on the right. Evangelical and charismatic Christianity never accepted the buffer. In the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that supply the party’s most committed voters, demons are real and active, prayer changes outcomes, prophecy continues, healing flows through hands, and spiritual warfare is a daily fact. The devil is an agent with plans. This is the porous self in full, not a remnant of it, and it constitutes the largest enchanted population in the developed world. The Republican coalition is built on top of it.
For decades the party paired this porous base with a buffered command structure. Fusionism, seen through Taylor, was an alliance of self-structures as much as ideologies: buffered money and porous believers. The Chamber of Commerce wing, the libertarian economists, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney (b. 1947) and the Ryan budget wonks, these were buffered men running a disenchanted politics of incentives and growth charts, while the enchanted base supplied votes and moral energy. The arrangement held as long as the buffered wing delivered respect along with judicial appointments. It stopped holding when the base noticed the respect was absent. What followed was the porous capture of the party.
Trump is the porous phenomenon par excellence, and Taylor explains him better than most political science does. Begin with his formation. His family church was Norman Vincent Peale’s (1898-1993), and positive thinking is a porous doctrine: words are forces that shape reality, speech acts on the world rather than describing it. Trump talks the way a man talks when he believes saying it makes it so. The fact-checkers spent a decade treating his statements as failed propositions, buffered selves grading an enchanted speaker, and they never touched him because his audience does not receive his words as propositions either. They receive them as acts, blessings and curses, loyalty and war. The rallies are enchanted events, closer to revival than to speech, where presence does the work and the crowd comes to feel a force rather than evaluate an argument. The MAGA hat functions as a talisman. The prophecy movement declared him a Cyrus, an anointed pagan instrument of God, and Paula White (b. 1966) stood in the White House calling on angels from Africa and South America. None of this embarrasses the base, because none of it is foreign to the porous self.
Conspiracy belongs in the same analysis. QAnon is a porous cosmology: hidden powers behind appearances, a cosmic war of good and evil, coming judgment, secret knowledge for the initiated. The Deep State is demonology for the administrative age. Where the buffered self sees institutions, procedures, and incompetence, the porous self sees powers and principalities, and the porous reading generates loyalty and martyrdom in a way no institutional analysis can. The COVID wars ran along the same line. To the buffered self, the vaccine is a technical object entering a body that is a system. To the porous self, the needle is the state crossing the boundary into the flesh, contamination by an alien power, and the resistance was felt at the level of self-structure before any argument arrived.
The buffered conservatives know they lost. George Will (b. 1941), the disenchanted Tory atheist, left the party. The Burke-and-Buckley style, argument, citation, the well-made essay, gave way to prophecy and rally. The remaining buffered men in the coalition, the tax-cut donors and the Federalist Society lawyers, now operate the way the Democratic porous wing operates in its party, as a tolerated minority that supplies something the dominant self-structure needs, in this case money and judicial craft, while the energy comes from elsewhere.
Taylor’s malaise of immanence shows up on the right in its own form, and here the party has an advantage it barely understands. The young men adrift in the disenchanted world, the audience that found Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) and kept going, hunger for exactly what the buffered order cannot supply: weight, meaning, a cosmos with stakes. The right offers re-enchantment without apology. Trad Catholicism, Orthodox conversion, the online vitalists and neo-pagans, the gym-and-God circuit, all of it sells thickness of being to selves starving on immanence. The left supplies re-enchantment too, but disguised, embarrassed, smuggled in as politics. The right sells it under its own name, and in a market of starving selves the open seller wins.
Now the costs, which are severe. Governance is buffered work. Regulations get drafted, budgets scored, agencies run, by disengaged reason operating on systems. A party whose energy is porous and whose governing requires buffered skills produces what we have watched it produce: administrations at war with their own technical staff, prophecy where planning should be, loyalty tests applied to jobs that need competence. The porous self also makes a magnificent market for grifters. An audience that receives words as forces and leaders as anointed will buy the supplements, the gold coins, the miracle cures, and the legal defense funds, and the right’s media economy has become in part a machine for harvesting enchanted trust. And porous politics has no internal brake. The buffered self can be argued out of a position. The possessed cannot, and a party that runs on enchantment cannot easily call its own demons off.
Step back and the two parties form a single picture. The selves are sorting. The buffered are consolidating in one party, the porous in the other, and each party keeps a shrinking minority of the opposite type, Black churchgoers among the Democrats, country-club rationalists among the Republicans. American polarization, read through Taylor, is not two ideologies fighting over policy. It is two self-structures that no longer share a world, one living among objects and the other among powers, each finding the other not wrong but unintelligible. The Republicans hold the deeper reservoir of what mass politics runs on. The Democrats hold the machinery of the disenchanted state. Neither can do what the other does, and the country requires both.
