In 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne pictured a shortcut to salvation in his tale The Celestial Railroad—a pilgrimage traded for a train ride. Instead of Bunyan’s arduous journey on foot, Hawthorne’s travelers ride in comfort by locomotive—past the Slough of Despond, over the Hill Difficulty, through Vanity Fair.
A moral struggle became a pleasure trip, with no need for perseverance, debate, or choice. The shortcut promised arrival, but the end was illusion.
That longing runs through today’s democracies, where difficulty is exchanged for promises of security and simplicity. Citizens clamor for nationalist, anti-globalist, and anti-immigrant policies. Political correctness and mainstream leaders are rejected as remote, while once-fringe parties, tied to Nazi ideology, gain legitimacy.
The mood—“this is not my government, these are not my people”—is now called far-right populism. The pattern is plain: when people want certainty or revenge, someone is ready to oblige.
We think of tyranny in terms of the tyrant, not the predisposition that makes them possible. It is harder to see our complicity in what we deplore. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Hugo Chávez, Putin, and Trump fit the mold: none created new passions; they exploited existing hatreds, nostalgias, and grievances.
Tyranny doesn’t arrive only in jackboots—it strolls in when people hold the door. Hannah Arendt spoke of the “banality of evil,” not to excuse Eichmann but to show how acts are carried out by ordinary functionaries who surrender judgment to duty. Tyranny grows not only from tyrants, but from the promise of security and the frailty of human freedom.
Dostoevsky pressed the point in The Brothers Karamazov. The parable of the Grand Inquisitor portrays freedom as a gift too heavy for most to bear. Christ returns to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition, performs miracles, and is arrested. The Inquisitor visits Him in prison and claims: humanity cannot handle the freedom He offers. People, he insists, crave bread, spectacle, and authority—not the burden of choice.
By rejecting the temptations, Christ asked too much of fragile human beings. The Church, the Inquisitor claims, corrected His mistake by giving people what they want: certainty and order, at the cost of truth and freedom.
When the monologue ends, Christ says nothing. He silently kisses the Inquisitor. The kiss unsettles him, but he releases Christ on condition He never return.
It is naive to dismiss the Inquisitor’s logic, which denies moral and spiritual flourishing. But it is as naive to deny that freedom—rightly understood and responsibly judged—remains essential to human and divine love. History, if not conviction, bears witness.
Like faith, democracy makes sense only with doubt and denial: who needs faith if the answers are settled, or democracy if there is nothing to argue about?
Democracy is no Quaker meeting where consensus prevails. It is a forum of conflict, where opposites align, impasse is adjudicated, and setbacks are inevitable. Liberal democracy pushes tolerance to its breaking point.
Extremism isn’t confined to the hard right. In The Authoritarian Dynamic, Karen Stenner warns against liberal fundamentalism: “Progressives must stop trying to save souls in politics and convert everyone to their faith, and instead become more effective at expressing their aims in the language and symbols of their opponents”—a reminder not lost on conservatives, either. Political discourse is a contest of visions, and effective rhetoric must reach even those it offends.
Democracy is always on the way. Its safeguard is argument. Deadlocks demand rethinking resistance. Anger performs better than it persuades. Even Melville worried about sounding like a preacher: “Try to get a Living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies.” Hawthorne, for his part, used satire to show that salvation without struggle is hollow: politics that promise effortless progress turn democracy into tyranny.
Justice Brandeis observed: “Those who won our independence” knew that fortitude is the price of freedom, and courage “the secret of liberty.” It is a truth to hold close in troubled times, with freedom secured by resolve—“the patriot dream that sees beyond the years.” [*]
Notes and reading
Rene Girard, celebrated cultural theorist, warned that politics—like sensuality and science—falls prey to “deviated transcendence.” [Hawthorne’s "The Celestial Railroad" explores the pursuit of salvation in worldly surrogates, such as nation, revolution, or identity.] Liberal democracy, while never immune, arguably remains the best check on this temptation (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel).
Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Celestial Railroad (1843, 2017). A parody of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: the pilgrim rides a train instead of walking, the same engine hauls the burden of sin, and Bunyan’s Evangelist becomes “Mr. Smooth-it-away.”
Herman Melville - To get interested all over again in Moby Dick, read Melville's letters to Hawthorne. Melville would make a great conversation companion for a while. Hawthorne, initially a close friend, eventually distanced himself, finding Melville’s passionate intensity and intellectual demands overwhelming. - The Divine Magnet (2016).
Hannah Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism (Second Edition, 1958); Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (2006). Arendt was a German-born Jewish political theorist whose distinctive framing of totalitarianism set the terms for its political reckoning ever since.
Karen Stenner, political psychologist – The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005). A groundbreaking study of how intolerance of difference (“difference-ism”) shapes authoritarian attitudes.
Justice Brandeis – paraphrased in Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution (1987).
[*] from America the Beautiful.
Thank you for a reminder of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. "People, he insists, crave bread, spectacle, and authority—not the burden of choice." Yes! Most choices aren't made without a loss of innocence. But innocence past the age of majority is predicated on an either-or, dualistic worldview and not a triadic worldview offered by freedom and forgiveness. The inquisitor today would adopt what William Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist calls "the imagination of the nation-state," the worldview of the bishops early in Pinochet's rule who failed to challenge Pinochet's protection of Chilean innocence and his attack on Chilean democracy. Bread and circuses (and authority)!
How can there be any remote possibility of agreeing on anything when the Moldy Orange Demon owns a website which publishes wall to wall lies. Namely Truth Social - even the title of the website is a lie.
What if never-ending argument is the principal vector of the now psychotic dis-ease that is destroying US culture, or what remains of it.
http://www.deborahtannen.com/the-argument-culture
What if the Republican Noise Machine is the leading edge vector of the collective US psychosis?
Such is the proposition mooted by David Brock in his book The Republican Noise Machine - and other books too including The Fox Effect.
Check out Network of lies by Brain Stelter too.
There are many more such books.