Just over eighty years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr—the leading American Protestant theologian of the day, and a major activist for progressive causes—published The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. While Niebuhr’s vision was complex, his central thesis was clear. The cynical, ruthless “children of darkness” often triumphed because they understood the seamy side of human nature and the dirty tricks of politics; the benevolent “children of light” were politically hamstrung by their failure to understand the appeal of selfish or malevolent human motives—or to detect dangers in their own seemingly good intentions. For democracy to survive, its defenders needed to grasp the dark side of human nature and politics—without giving way to misanthropy or despair.
If William A. Galston is not exactly the Niebuhr of our age (he comes from secular academia, and his politics are less radical), he may be the closest to Niebuhr we have: a penetrating thinker who is also a veteran in Democratic Party politics—senior domestic-policy adviser in the first Clinton administration, longtime participant in the D.C. think-tank world, and columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He has also, over five decades, published eight books of political theory, each concerned with the virtues and viability of liberal democracy.
Galston’s latest book opens with a concise definition of the politics he defends: “Liberal democracy is limited democracy.” Privacy, legal rights, and constitutional procedures protect individuals from the will of the majority. Power is limited and divided. Authority is chastened: governments are the servants of those they rule, and their power is open to questioning and revocation. Following thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, Galston links liberalism’s protection of individual conscience and pluralism to the conviction that no one side in a dispute possesses a monopoly on truth or virtue. Indeed plural, sometimes conflicting values lie at the heart of liberalism itself: it prizes both liberty and equality, while recognizing that each must be moderated to preserve the other.
Because it involves tension and balance and imposes limits on political actions that slow down, qualify, or block the achievement of desirable goals, liberal democracy is frequently frustrating. Galston has long stressed that liberalism neither expects nor aspires to produce a nation of saints but depends on citizens exhibiting certain virtues. Indeed, liberal democracy, “more than any other form of government, requires restraint and mutual forbearance,” and “comity”—a mutual respect that prevents us from seeking to completely defeat, dominate, humiliate, and exact vengeance against our opponents. Sustaining liberal democracy also calls for a “rigorous realism,” a sober sense of responsibility, and the fortitude to sustain political action despite awareness of the impossibility of complete, lasting victory over human evil. (Courage is the virtue that Galston—who, unusually for a liberal theorist, served as a Marine sergeant during the Vietnam War—most frequently invokes.)
While liberalism is always fragile, today it is particularly vulnerable, thanks to both its successes and failures. Liberal successes let us forget the worse alternatives from which liberal democracy shields us; they foster complacency, boredom, a longing for something more exciting. Liberal failures lead many to yearn not only for reforms—which Galston acknowledges are needed—but for more radical transformation.
Even as he offers crushing rejoinders to those who hanker after the thrills of revolutionary action (or profess to do so), Galston is also a searching critic of liberals’ “naïveté about human motivations.” Following Niebuhr and other twentieth-century liberals, he indicts liberal optimism and rationalism. Confidence in democracy’s triumph has usually reflected assumptions that are more convenient than accurate: that reason, deployed on behalf of morality or self-interest, can overcome passion, and that human beings all want basically the same things and will readily accept the blessings of liberal democracy. Faith that market exchanges will knit the world pacifically together bespeaks a “myopic materialism” that ignores how the pursuit of profit can lead to appalling cruelty and misery. Faith in democratic institutions and liberal education to foster benevolence has proven high-minded and ill-founded. The temptation to regard history as a story of continuous and lasting progress rather than ever-threatening regression is fueled by both gratifying successes and exhaustion after past battles. Against these assumptions, Galston insists that we must ground the defense of liberal democracy in realism about human nature, which includes an “attraction to evil”—“dominating others…subordinating them, humiliating them, gratifying lust, and inflicting unspeakable cruelties.” (While the current occupant of the Oval Office only appears by name in the penultimate chapter, his visage is detectable in such passages.)
The heart of Galston’s book is composed of chapters on each of the titular “dark passions.” The first two, anger and fear, are inescapable, evident in human beings from infancy onward; rare is the individual so saintly, or insensate, as to be free from them. They are also politically powerful. Galston supposes that “antipathy may…be the dominant political sentiment.” He revealingly catalogues anger’s triggers: injury, deprivation of something good, humiliation. The last is often the most enraging: loss of face can provoke more unappeasable fury than loss of property. In this regard, liberal democracy may make anger more likely. It creates expectations of being treated as equals, in contrast to earlier ages’ acceptance of “natural” hierarchies.
At the same time, the liberal tendency to view people as individuals runs up against the human proclivity for “sympathetic identification” with collectives. National injury provokes especially intense, widespread, and organized rage. Anger, furthermore, can live on as simmering resentment, which may be stirred up at any moment. Galston notes that while resentment may be justified, it also tends to exceed reasonable demands for just rectification, spawning unlimited hunger for revenge. He does not quite articulate an additional source of danger: it feels good to regard oneself as wronged, lending an element of righteousness and providing a dramatic script in which one exchanges impotent spluttering for the role of avenging hero. Furthermore, while anger is a negative emotion, for many it is preferable to grief, the other natural response to being wronged.
Galston is perceptive in surveying the many sources of fear that are inescapable aspects of the human condition; he also notes the recent intensification of a sense of insecurity. Fear is, of course, often reasonable and politically necessary; lack of reasonable fear can lead to folly (as in denialism over the dangers of Covid—or climate change). But overpowering, will-liquifying terror is quite another matter. Political leaders, Galston insists, should offer a sense of agency against the powerlessness instilled by terror, seeking “not to abolish [fear] bur rather to abate it.” While “living without fear is an unreasonable hope,” we can gain a grip over our fears by “cultivating the virtue of courage.” Yet, as with anger, people may not want to abandon fear. As Galston notes, there is a “seduction” to alarmism: it offers a sense of superior judgment (we have seen threats to which others are blind), and by “raising the stakes,” it renders a prosaic world more exciting.
While anger and fear are the stuff of politics, the “lust for domination” may be most characteristic of politicians. It involves a desire for total control, which recognizes no limits, seeking to subject everything to its will. There is no familiar English word for this passion, so Galston resorts to a phrase from Augustinian theology. Perhaps because it is less familiar, Galston is at pains to distinguish the lust for domination from other appetites. This is bound to be difficult, both because passions are seldom freestanding and unmixed, and because the lust for domination typically appears masked—from others, and often from the persons driven by it. These inherent ambiguities may explain why this chapter is somewhat less satisfying than its predecessors (it is also shorter). It is unclear whether Galston believes, with Augustine and Nietzsche, that the lust for domination is a pervasive characteristic of the human heart or will; or, with Machiavelli, that humanity is divided between those who wish to dominate and those who simply desire not to be dominated. Nor is it clear whether the lust for domination is the same sort of passion as anger and fear, which can be well-founded and healthy. If the other two dark passions become vices only when they are excessive or inappropriately directed, the lust for domination seems an inherent vice, tied up with “cruelty” and “evil.”
Ambiguities attend another purely destructive passion: hatred. Galston distinguishes hatred from anger, which is provoked by what the object of anger does, whereashatred is directed at what the hated figure is. Hatred is accordingly unconnected to any principle of justice or measure of reason. It cannot be appeased, only combatted. This distinction, while useful, may be too tidy. Indignation based on actions (real or perceived) easily escalates to outright hatred, while hatred often wears the mask of justified anger. Galston’s prime example of hatred is Nazi antisemitism. But, as he knows, angerfostered by the Treaty of Versailles and the myth that Germany lost World War I due to a “stab in the back” fertilized the ground in which that hatred flourished. And many Germans claimed, and were probably sincerely convinced, that their persecutions were justified by (imagined) malevolent Jewish conspiracies.
Difficulty in distinguishing between anger and hatred also bedevils many current conflicts. On American campuses, disputes about the limits of free speech often hinge on whether activists are motivated by anger at Israeli atrocities or hatred of Jews. It does not seem outrageously ungenerous to suspect that much of the anger provoked by (alleged) excesses of gender-affirming care or illegal immigration or welfare dependency ultimately stems from hatred of trans and nonwhite people. As Galston notes, Trump and his followers often resort to dehumanizing language—labeling opponents “sick and sinister,” “criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs,” “freaks” or “rats” who must be not only defeated but exterminated. Such invective has found purchase not only because of the insecurity and resentments that many Americans receptive to the promise of “retribution” may feel, but also because deep cultural resources existed for dividing the country and the world into children of light and children of darkness, true Americans and foreigners—and viewing the latter not just with anger but with hatred.
If this is correct, and if, as Galston says, hatred cannot be appeased but only fought, some major partisan divides may not be resolvable through conciliation. Yet the whole point of liberal democracy is to find ways to live together peacefully in the face of deep disagreement. Sustaining liberal democracy may sometimes demand that we act as if we are facing anger rather than hatred—even when this is uncertain or untrue. The problem with this strategy is that, by the time hatred has become too powerful to ignore or to treat as if it were merely anger, it may also be too powerful to defeat in any other way—as proved to be the case in Germany in 1933 (and perhaps America in 2024).
Galston warns against “fighting fire with fire,” answering antiliberal radicalism with liberal repression. His response to the dark passions recommends eloquence rather than coercion. Such eloquence appeals to emotion, reason, and the trust or confidence evoked by the speaker’s character; it is as much a matter of tone and the relationship between speaker and audience as it is a matter of the words said. It may also derive its power from the virtues the speaker models: think of Volodymyr Zelensky’s exhibition of a calm, quiet, wry courage in the face of the blustery simulacra of “manliness” presented by Russian (and American) strongmen.
As Galston acknowledges, speech is no substitute for good policies; he also stresses that rhetoric put in service of domination is “the greatest threat to democracies.” Even when deployed for liberal purposes, rhetoric’s efficacy depends on circumstances. Abraham Lincoln was arguably America’s greatest political rhetorician. But while his oratory in the Lincoln-Douglas debates bequeathed a powerful public philosophy, it did not win him the Senate seat that he was seeking. His attempts at inspiration and conciliation failed to save the Union—military and economic force (and luck) did that. His moving expressions of humility and magnanimity in the second inaugural address did not staunch wounds, which still have not healed; nor did his clear-sighted, yet never stridently self-righteous diagnosis of the evils of slavery set the stage for a successfully sustained reconstruction.
Franklin Roosevelt seems to offer a more promising case, and Galston examines his speeches and “fireside chats” as models. But it is not clear that the mix of humble familiarity and cultural authority that Roosevelt projected is available anymore, given both the transformation of media and broader cultural shifts. Galston notes that “the display of public or private virtue is no longer a necessary condition for trust.” Perhaps even more worryingly, it is unclear whether the public can agree on what counts as virtue. When intellectuals who claim to be defenders of traditional morality praise the venal, vulgar libertine Trump for his “character,” we seem to be dealing with something beyond even the fracturing of America into “different epistemic communities” noted by Galston. Roosevelt-style appeals to “reason, common sense, and civic virtue” may fall on deaf ears—or indeed be regarded with contempt precisely by those who see themselves as the true apostles of virtue and common sense. Some found Obama just as reassuring and inspiring as FDR; others found him condescending, hypocritical—or even an un- or anti-American crypto-terrorist.
Even if it offers no clear solutions to these problems, Galston’s book remains sadly timely and timelessly wise. In the face of both dark passions and institutional failure, no clear solutions are possible. Responding will require the oratorical skill Galston extols, the astute judgment he invokes—and a mastery of contemporary media and cultural currents that he does not claim to offer. Above all, it will require “the civic courage on which the defense of liberty always depends,” and which Galston holds most dear: the courage to live without clear and certain solutions, to master the dark passions in ourselves, and to stand up to the infliction of those dark passions on the vulnerable and on our civic fabric.
Anger, Fear, Domination
Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech
William A. Galston
Yale University Press
$28 | 176 pp.
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