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.
The Democratic Party comes off worse, because it is the institutional home of the creed Mearsheimer calls a delusion. The GOP contains a faction his theory vindicates. The Democrats are built on the thing he says is false.
Start with the core. Rights universalism is the party’s official religion. Every human being everywhere holds the same inalienable rights, and politics exists to vindicate them. This is the language of the party’s lawyers, its NGOs, its foundations, its foreign policy hands, and its activist base. If Mearsheimer is right, this creed misdescribes the species. People do not experience themselves as bearers of universal rights. They experience themselves as members of particular groups, and the largest group that commands real sacrifice is the nation. A party whose moral vocabulary runs past the nation to humanity asks voters for an allegiance almost no one feels. “Citizen of the world” is, on his premises, a phrase that describes nobody.
Here is the paradox, though. The Democrats preach universalism and practice tribalism. The party’s electoral machine is a coalition of identity groups, each organized around the group attachments Mearsheimer says drive human beings. So the party half-confirms his theory in its daily operations while denying it in its philosophy. The trouble is the level at which the tribalism operates. The Democratic coalition mobilizes tribes below the nation: racial groups, gender categories, sexual identities. The Republican coalition increasingly mobilizes the nation as the tribe. If Mearsheimer is right that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, the party that organizes sub-national tribes against a party that claims the national tribe has chosen the weaker position. Ceding the flag is ceding the strongest force in politics.
The coalition structure produces its own pathologies under his premises. A party of many tribes without a tribe above them must pay each member group constantly, in policy, in language, in vetoes over the platform. Each group polices its boundary, because that is what tribes do. Hence the purity spirals, the acronym politics, the inability to tell any constituent group no. A single-tribe party disciplines itself around the leader. A many-tribe party negotiates itself into paralysis.
The professional-class wing fares no better. The educated stratum that now dominates the party believes in reason as the route to political truth: explain the policy, check the facts, correct the misinformation, and voters will update. This is the anthropology Mearsheimer ranks last. If socialization and innate sentiment beat reason as sources of belief, then explainer journalism, fact-checking operations, and the whole technocratic style convert almost no one. The misinformation framing rests on the assumption that wrong beliefs come from bad information, when on his account they come from group attachment, and no correction touches them. Thomas Frank (b. 1965) asked what was the matter with Kansas, why voters there ignored their material interests. Mearsheimer’s answer is that nothing was the matter. Voters vote their tribe. The Democrats keep offering material benefits to working-class voters, the rational-actor appeal, and keep watching those voters, White and increasingly Hispanic and Black, drift toward the party that offers belonging instead. Benefits do not buy loyalty. Membership does.
Immigration is where the creed costs most. The universalist logic runs straight to the activist positions: no human is illegal, asylum is a human right, enforcement is violence. The national tribe’s boundary instinct runs the other way, and on Mearsheimer’s account that instinct sits deeper than any argument. The party’s immigration politics since 2013 reads as a long experiment in testing his theory, with the results he predicts.
Foreign policy implicates the Democrats as much as the neocons. Liberal hegemony was a bipartisan project, and its Democratic version, humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, the rules-based international order, flows from the same universalism. Libya was a Democratic war. If Mearsheimer is right, the Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition of foreign policy fails for the same reason the Bush tradition failed: you cannot install a creed in a society whose members were socialized into something else. The antiwar left, long the party’s embarrassing uncle, holds the position his theory endorses, which mirrors the GOP’s situation, where the restrainers were the embarrassing uncles until recently.
Now the other side of the ledger, because his premises also reveal the Democrats’ great hidden asset. If socialization beats reason, the side that controls the institutions of childhood and young adulthood wins the long game regardless of elections. Progressives hold the schools, the universities, the entertainment industry, the HR departments. They perform the value infusion on each cohort before its critical faculties mature. Young Americans lean left not because the arguments persuaded them but because the institutions formed them, which is exactly how Mearsheimer says moral codes get made. On his premises this is worth more than any presidency. It also explains why the Republican assault on those institutions, school choice, homeschooling, the university funding fights, is rational rather than paranoid. Both sides now act as if Mearsheimer is right about where beliefs come from.
One more implication, about religion. The Democrats became the secular party as their constituencies stopped going to church, and on Mearsheimer’s account that removed a deep source of solidarity and moral formation. What filled the space looks like a substitute creed: sacred values, blasphemy norms, conversion narratives, excommunications. This confirms his anthropology, humans will have a tribe and a sacred order whether or not they call it religion. But the substitute is the creed of a class, formed in universities and fluent only there. It cannot scale to a nation, and it alienates the voters whose formation happened elsewhere.
The path his theory suggests is the one the party keeps finding and losing. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) fused liberal policy to national solidarity and won five consecutive presidential cycles for his party. Barack Obama (b. 1961) ran in 2008 on one America, no red states and blue states, the national tribe, and won bigger than any Democrat since. The party wins when it claims the nation and loses when it speaks past it, upward to humanity or downward to the demographic coalition. If Mearsheimer is right, the Democrats’ problem is not their policies, which often poll well. It is that they built a church on the doctrine that congregations do not exist.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line in A Secular Age between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world stands open to forces outside it. Spirits, curses, blessings, relics, and words can get in and do things to you. Meaning lives in the world, not just in minds. The buffered self of modernity closes that boundary. Meaning retreats inside the head, the world becomes a neutral system of objects, and the self gains invulnerability at the price of what Taylor calls the malaise of immanence, the flatness of a disenchanted world. Run the Democratic Party through this distinction and the party splits open along a line nobody in it can name.
The party’s commanding heights belong to the most buffered population ever assembled. The professional class that staffs the campaigns, the foundations, the agencies, and the newsrooms lives the buffered life in full: secular, credentialed, therapeutic, managerial. Its political style follows from its self-structure. Policy is social engineering. Problems are technical. The world is a system to administer, and the administrator stands outside what he administers, disengaged, running the numbers. Trust the science. Read the explainer. The wonk is the buffered self doing politics, and the party’s chronic production of candidates who read as managers rather than leaders comes from a class that trained itself out of the registers in which leadership is felt rather than evaluated.
But the party’s base was never buffered. The Black church is a porous institution. Grace moves through bodies there, the Spirit descends, the dead are present, and a sermon is an event in the world rather than a transfer of information. Hispanic Catholicism keeps its saints, its candles, its processions. Immigrant communities carry enchanted worlds with them. For most of the twentieth century the Democratic coalition ran on this porousness. The civil rights movement was a porous event. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) spoke of souls, redemption, and the beloved community, and the language did work because his hearers had selves that language of that kind could enter. The party’s moral music came from its porous wing. As the leadership class secularized, the party kept the songbook and lost the voice. Obama could still cross the line, singing Amazing Grace in Charleston, preaching eulogy as a participant rather than an observer. Hillary Clinton (b. 1947) could not, and the difference between those two politicians is in large part the difference between a man who could enter the porous register and a woman locked in the buffered one.
Now the strange part. Taylor predicts the buffered self will not rest easy. The closed boundary produces flatness, and the flatness produces a hunger for re-enchantment. Look at the party’s activist wing through this lens and you find the porous self reborn inside the secular world. Words wound there. A slur is not information about the speaker but a force that enters and damages the hearer, which is porous anthropology to the letter, meaning located in the word as a power rather than in the mind as an interpretation. Safe spaces are anti-contagion architecture. Trauma discourse describes a self that external events colonize and inhabit. Whiteness functions as a possessing force that operates through people without their intent, and implicit bias names a spirit you carry unknowing, while “doing the work” is the exorcism. Systemic racism, in its strongest formulations, has the structure of an enchanted force: invisible, omnipresent, acting at a distance, working through hosts. None of this is meant as mockery. It confirms Taylor. Strip a population of God, saints, and sacraments, and the porous structure does not vanish. It returns wearing secular clothes, with sacred victims in place of saints, privilege confessions in place of the confessional, and cancellation in place of excommunication.
So the party holds a contradiction it cannot see. Its official epistemology is buffered: facts, data, expertise, the disenchanted universe of the explainer. Its activist practice is porous: contamination, purity, possession, words as forces. The same young staffer who mocks religious voters for believing words can be blasphemous will file an HR complaint describing speech as violence, and no one in the building notices the two anthropologies at war in one person. Taylor calls this cross-pressure, the buffered self haunted by what it buffered out, and the Democratic Party may be the most cross-pressured institution in American life.
The electoral costs run in two directions. Toward the religious, the buffered leadership cannot hear porous claims as anything but irrational preference. A religious-liberty claim sounds like a policy demand rather than what it is, a report from people for whom the sacred is real and violable. The party’s tone-deafness toward the devout, including the devout inside its own coalition, is a translation failure between self-structures. Toward the unchurched young, the party becomes the accidental supplier of enchantment. Politics turns into the only available source of the sacred, which produces activists who need politics to deliver meaning, belonging, and salvation, loads on the system it was never built to carry. A buffered politics of administration cannot feed them, so they radicalize toward the porous politics of purity and contamination, and the party’s internal wars follow.
Mass politics itself is a porous experience. The rally, the flag, the martyr, the anthem, solidarity felt in a crowd, these work on selves to the degree the boundary opens. A party run by buffered selves distrusts all of it as manipulation, kitsch, or danger, and so it cedes the enchanted register of national life to its opponents while wondering why its superior policy papers do not move anyone. The Democrats’ nostalgia for the civil rights era is nostalgia for the last moment the party spoke as a porous institution and the country felt it. The songbook is still on the shelf. The question Taylor leaves is whether a leadership class formed by disenchantment can ever sing from it again, or whether it can only cite it.
