By Francis X. Maier
Yes, unfortunately, it’s another election year. You already know what that means. The free-fire zone formerly known as our public square demands that we step away from our screens and think. We think to understand. And the best way to understand the character of our times is by tracing the lineage of the ideas and the actors who have shaped them. Marx, Nietzsche, and many others rank among the usual suspects. But I would argue that the genealogy reaches much further back.
The late political activist Saul Alinsky named the founder of the modern revolutionary spirit on the epigraph page of his Rules for Radicals: “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the established order and did it so effectively that, at least, he won his own kingdom: Lucifer.”
Alinsky was a secular, agnostic Jew. He did not believe in a personal devil. He was far more interested in the structures of power in this life than in any imagined for the next. His reference to Satan was therefore purely ironic and deliberately provocative.
Yet his epigraph captures a distinctively modern (though discreet) sympathy for Lucifer as a kind of Prometheus; a wounded hero fighting for his dignity, insisting on his own way, and bravely resisting tyrannical authority. It is a vision that derives from the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century such as Blake, Shelley, and Byron, who in turn drew on John Milton’s great epic poem, Paradise Lost, recasting Milton’s Lucifer less as a villain and more as a tragic figure.
Except that they completely misunderstood Milton’s Satan.
For those who have not read Paradise Lost or have forgotten it since school, it is one of the great treasures of Western civilization. The story is simple. In heaven, God exalts His begotten Son and places Him above the angels. Envy and wounded pride drive Lucifer and his followers to rebellion. Defeated, they are cast into Hell. In his torment and futile rage against God, Satan attacks and corrupts God’s innocent creation: Adam and Eve.
Milton’s portrait of Satan is the very opposite of admiration. Obsessed with his own overweening pride, refusing to accept the reality of his sin and his dependence on the Creator, Satan methodically disintegrates from a spirit of immense grandeur and power into a repulsive, scheming serpent. Trapped in endless frustration and fury, he cannot build or create. He can only posture, seduce, harm, and destroy. He becomes not only the father of lies but also of nihilism.
On the cultural front, Roger Scruton described nihilism in our modern appetite for deconstruction—tearing down old truths, reinterpreting literature and history, altering political structures—in a chapter aptly titled “The Devil’s Work”.
Fyodor Dostoevsky captured the deception and nihilism of revolutionary politics in Demons (also translated as The Possessed), his novel about radical agitation and violence in nineteenth-century rural Russia. For Dostoevsky, the revolutionary temptation was a “fire in the minds of men.” And that phrase, that fire, later became the title of James Billington’s great study of the roots of revolutionary thought.
For Billington—the late Librarian of Congress, Harvard and Princeton scholar, and executive director of four federal cultural institutions—the modern revolutionary impulse is a kind of elite virus, the “spiritual hunger of those who think rather than the material hunger of those who work.” Modern revolutionaries “are believers, no less committed or intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier age.”
Revolutionary thought becomes “an object of faith and a source of vocation, a channel of sublimated emotion and sublime ambition. If traditional religion is described as ‘the opium of the people,’ the new revolutionary faith might well be called the amphetamine of the intellectuals.” His chapter on “The Occult Origins of the [First] Revolutionary Organization” holds special interest for a Christian reader.
What is the point here? Simply this: if we do not see the fire in our own backyard, it is because we have not been paying attention.
The United States is a republic, not a democracy. That is deliberate. It is a feature, not a flaw. The people express their will through elected representatives. But the checks and balances of the various branches of government exist to preserve ordered liberty and to contain the passing turbulence of popular furies and enthusiasms. This reflects the character and wisdom of the Founding Fathers: a blend of Enlightenment optimism and biblical realism. We were created for glory, beauty, and love. We can achieve extraordinary things.
Yet—all of us—also have a small workshop hidden in the heart where we perfect our resentments, discontents, and hatreds. In this world we are neither perfect nor perfectible, and no revolution can change that. When we try to build Heaven on earth, we create instead a rather convincing replica of Hell. Put another way: there is a saint and a predator inside each of us. The one we feed becomes the person we become. And that person helps shape the nation and the world we share.
American political life has always had rough and ugly edges, and plenty of injustice. Yet we have managed to create a country with decent laws and remarkable freedoms; a place of opportunity, material benefits, and security for the great majority of its citizens; a nation where injustice can be pointed out and corrected peacefully. None of this is guaranteed. Everything can be lost. It needs to be sustained by each new generation.
Unfortunately, success has a habit of breeding self-absorption and irresponsibility. Both are toxic. Yet that is where we find ourselves in this 2026. And the last thing we need—but now must confront—is a bitter and delusional politics rooted in ignorance and hatred of our history, our culture, our public institutions, and even our religious beliefs.
When candidates seriously suggest dismantling and reconstituting the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and other elements of our public life, we have more than a passing glitch in the system. The words “democratic” and “progressive” today often taste pleasant on the tongue, but carry a rather different scent coming from somewhere well south of paradise.
John Milton would not be surprised.
About the Author
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.