Tip-Off #178 – And now. . . – by William Green
Irony is running out of energy. Today’s craziness leaves serious humorists at a loss for words. “My therapist suggested a digital detox, but then what apocalypse would I miss?” Patricia Lockwood nails the chaos: “We didn’t trap george washington’s head in a quarter for this.”
Master ironist Lockwood recently wondered whether the tendency to respond ironically to everything is effective anymore or merely energizes passivity. Good question. So much that is blatantly odd may be irony enough—like savants in power looking forward to life on Mars, a billionaire looking forward to being frozen at death (cryogenesis), and government officials intent on dismantling the government. At the same time, the president insists on annexing Canada, buying Greenland, and starting a trade war to lower prices. Perhaps the ultimate irony is renowned scholars rationalizing this nonsense as doom for modern decadence (liberalism)—another nail in the coffin of my own pretense.
We have a guide: the recently released study, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else, by a professor in philosophy and religious thought, author of The Serpent’s Gift (University of Chicago Press, 2024)—serious humor.
In a recent interview, Patricia Lockwood said, “I don’t know how you’re supposed to react in real-time to absurd events that are also so serious. . . Maybe it’s time to enter some new form of sincerity or radical unprotectedness.”
Back to earnestness: A new kind of sincerity would face conflict squarely instead of spoiling it with a happy face. In his poem “A Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens wrote, “A violent order is disorder; a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.” While Stevens may not have directly addressed politics, these lines evoke the tension at democracy’s core.
As James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10, “The peril of democracy is its promise: without discord, it would not be necessary.” Yet he also warned that democracy’s promise turns dangerous when a single party or leader monopolizes power. Conflict and division are not flaws but essential features of democracy—inevitable and irreconcilable. Authoritarian governance, by contrast, would paralyze this tension with the promise of escaping politics altogether.
Caught between resisting tyranny and paradoxically enabling it by privileging dissent, democracy can lead to endless infighting and debates over the common good —fueling the division that despots exploit. In a democracy, the common good is always up for debate; tyranny offers a shortcut that silences discussion.
Democracy is tedious, full of meetings that only raise more questions—meandering through motions and minutiae—leaving people thinking, “Give me a break.” On the left and right, there’s a genuine desire to leave aside all the craziness, reconnect with friends and family, and not stop with two beers.
Founder James Madison again comes to mind. He lived through one of the worst epochs of American partisanship. The 1790s have been characterized as a “decade-long shouting match.” His most famous argument teaches that “the latent causes of faction” are not situational but are “sown in the nature of man.” Since a factious tendency is inherent in who we are, replete with visions of virtue, no democracy can survive without sincere disagreement.
Unlike tyranny, democracy thrives on the tension of unresolved questions and the perpetual struggle to define the common good. Its vitality lies in its refusal to settle, yet this quality leaves it vulnerable to those who trade freedom for the security of order and the protection of chastity.
Unity requires collaboration, not agreement. Tyranny demands agreement and enforces consent. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress,” said formerly enslaved statesman Frederick Douglass. “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.”
During Reconstruction, Douglass advanced a vision of “composite nationality.” He sought to transform U.S. democracy by extending equal citizenship rights and dignity to oppressed peoples—Black and Indigenous Americans—while embracing immigrants, particularly those of color. “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.” Indeed, democracy, like freedom, demands courage: it is sustained through those who brave the storm, resisting the illusion of quieter times.
For Douglass, irony sustained true patriotism: democracy is only here when it’s on the way. It is never fixed and final, living its question, unsettling its answers. Douglass saw his fiercest struggles as a testament to truth. And, deep in his heart, he actually believed “I shall overcome someday”—as would the nation.
Given his own wit, which he strategically deployed, Frederick Douglass could have upstaged Patricia Lockwood: “We didn’t trap george washington’s head in a quarter” for anything less.
Background and notes
Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About (2022). The emotional whiplash of handling collective trauma and personal loss amid digital noise. How devastation and connection produce each other. – Jia Tolentino.
“Open the Portal: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood” – Jenna Mahale, a writer and editor based in London—Los Angeles Review of Books (February 26, 2021).
(“New sincerity” – David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” – essay, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, 51. “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values.”)
How to Think Impossibly. . . – Jeffrey John Kripal (2024). Humanistic and scientific inquiry fosters awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is super natural, and the impossible is possible, not just humorously. – Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He has written influential works on comparative religion, mysticism, and the intersection of religion with paranormal phenomena and popular culture.
“Democracy seems to revive in a scene of wild disorder and tumult.” – Adam Ferguson, Scottish philosopher and historian (1757), cited by Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Democracy and Difference (1996), Chapter Two.
James Madison – The Federalist Papers No.10 (1787), a foundational text in American political thought. Available for free on websites like Project Gutenberg.
“Madison’s Five Lessons for Overcoming Polarization” – Lynn Uzzell, RealClear Public Affairs (March 18, 2021). Uzzell is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself:
Electronic Edition. Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895. – Also, the 1864 speech “The Mission of the War.”
> “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
(The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass – Douglas, reissued 2023)
“Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy: On a universal right to migration and the ideal of ‘composite nationality’” – Juliet Hooker, Public Seminar (March 18, 2021). Hooker is “Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence” in Political Science at Brown University.
“MAGA agonistes” – Victor Davis Hanson, The New Criterion (February 2025). “Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at ‘systemic’ racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.” Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, conservative political commentator, and a Visiting Critic at the Criterion.
Tip-Off #177 – The Year of the Snake