Patrick Deneen explains Voegelin's history of political philosophy--which explains a lot about the world we live in today and what must be overcome in America.
...There have been three political-theological “stages” or “chapters” in
western history. The first was the age of Civil Religion: when the gods
existed in the service of human cities, and human allegiance to the
gods was equal to allegiance to the city....
...The second stage was the age of Christendom. Christianity represented a
“radical revolution” in the history of the world, teaching that humans
were citizens of two cities - the City of God and the City of
Man. Christians aspired to becoming full members of the City of God, and
thus understood that their citizenship in any earthly city was
temporary and conditional - we were better understood to be pilgrims
than “love it or leave it” citizens....
...The third state developed as an outgrowth of the Christian revolution:
immediately, along with what would become Augustinian Christianity,
there arose a number of heresies, most importantly (in Voegelin’s view)
Gnosticism. Gnosticism was the belief that the world was a fallen and
imperfect place (true), but that humans equipped with a form of divine
knowledge (gnosis) could transcend these imperfections, achieving through gnosis
a perfected existence outside and beyond the fallen world. Voegelin
argued that modern Gnosticism was an effort to “redivinize” the
political world - not now by bringing the gods in to the service of the
city, but by making the city into a heaven on earth. Voegelin saw the
rise of totalitarianism as a potent form of fully political Gnosticism -
or the belief in human perfectibility through politics - in the form of
Fascism and Marxism, aligned against the still-extant forms of
Christendom that he saw especially vital in the United States and Great
Britain....
The Modern Project, espoused and financed by such as Gates, Zuckerberg, Schwab, and dozens of others allied through the World Economic Forum, or certain dicasteries of the UN such as the WHO, and especially those who are going to 'create better mankind' through implanting various and sundry chips, (transhumanism) is gnosis writ large.
Much of that project derives from what Burnham called 'the Managerial State.'
...Theorists Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried, developing ideas inspired by the analytical framework of James Burnham,[1] say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power, regardless of what political party holds a majority.
Variations on the concept include the therapeutic managerial state, welfare–warfare state,[2] administrative state,[3] and polite or soft totalitarianism.[4] There is significant overlap between the concepts of the managerial state and the deep state,
with theorists of the managerial state additionally drawing from
theories of political religion and the secularization of Christian
concepts, namely Puritanism,[5]
which they contend demand an overweening concern with government
intervention in favor of social justice, unaccountable regulation of
citizens' private lives, and both informally and formally enforced political correctness.[6] Theorists of the managerial state claim this constellation of factors tends towards the efflux of totalitarianism, which they call soft totalitarianism[7] and engage in criticism of administrative law and rulemaking.[8]
While Deneen goes on to quote Voegelin about Russia, and shows that Voegelin more-or-less predicted the Ukraine war, we'll look at the analysis of America.
...[Voegelin] points as well to the presence of gnosticism in the liberal democracies
of the west. In significant part, his book is a polemic not so much
against totalitarian communism, but the tendencies of liberalism to
develop its own potent forms of gnosticism. He sees this as inherent
feature of modern liberalism to the extent that it is drawn to several
commitments that tend toward gnosticism. Those features are not limited
to, but centrally include, an affinity to theories of progress,
particularly through the form of applied scientism....
...Western liberal democracies were no less susceptible to the tendency
toward gnosticism as their more radical counterparts in Germany and
Russia; but, rather than making an appearance in a revolutionary form,
the gnosticism was more likely to develop out of a “reformist,” what he
called “right” gnosticism; - or, more clearly, the progressivist left.
“Right” gnosticism (or, Leftism) would appear as reformist impulse
within liberalism, but would gravitate in the direction of a more
radical, “messianic” gnosticism over time....
... The experience of the past several decades have only confirmed
Voegelin’s fear and warning. What was once a “reformist left” is today a
radicalized messianic party, advancing its gnostic vision amid the
ruins of the Christian civilization that once balanced these forces.
What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the
revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are
legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the
“traditional” - i.e., natural - family. The effort to define sexuality
according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An
understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. The
disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life - the working
class. The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human
life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an
extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse - the belief that the physical
world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and
enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death. All
the while these various mandates followed the trajectory of a raft of
other economic and social policies that had led to the empowerment of a
disembodied “laptop class” - or what N.S. Lyons has dubbed
“the Virtuals” - at the expense of the working class, or the
“Physicals.” The decades following America’s victory in the Cold War
was a perfectly scripted expression of Gnostic belief and power -
ironically, the pyhrric lap of a “classical and Christian” civilization
that was enjoying the fruits of victory over its Gnostic foe....
Another way to put it is this: the United States' governance crisis is actually a crisis of faith. Gnosticism is now, and always has been, a heresy; it was foreshadowed by Eve's bite at the 'tree of knowledge's' apple. It is the ugliest daughter of Pride.
Populism is the secular reaction to this gnostic grab and, if history is correct, there will be a religious revival as the second wave of the revolution contra gnosticism.
That is, if there's time left for it to occur.
