Conviction, fanaticism and the republic's capacity to change its mind

A sentence circulates in several forms: no one has done more damage to the United States than those most certain they are saving it. It is wrong in a useful way, and the useful part is worth separating from the wrong part before the wrong part gets quoted again.

Start with what it gets wrong. Conviction is not the problem. The abolitionists were certain. The suffragists were certain. The people who marched in Birmingham in 1963, knowing about the dogs and the hoses, were certain, and their certainty produced the moral progress this country can point to without flinching. Any account of political damage that indicts strong belief as such ends up indicting the people who turned out to be right, which is a sign the account has gone wrong somewhere. The superlative fails too. Foreign powers have done profound harm through war and terror; panics and pandemics have redirected the country with no help from anyone’s moral certainty; plenty of leaders have pursued corrupt ends with no illusion of patriotic virtue, and cynicism has a destructive range of its own. Worst, the sentence cannot tell an abolitionist from a Klansman. Both were certain they were saving the country, and only one was.

What separates conviction that renews a republic from conviction that wrecks one is not how hotly it is held but whether it remains answerable, whether the world is still permitted to talk back. Responsible conviction keeps asking whether reality conforms to its expectations. Fanaticism asks only whether reality has submitted yet. The trouble is that the two feel identical from inside. Both supply energy, clarity and the sense of standing on the right side of an argument that matters. Neither announces which one it is.

The American record is largely a record of people who guessed wrong about which they had. The men behind the Indian Removal Act believed they were sparing the republic a century of frontier war. Defenders of slavery came to describe themselves as preserving constitutional liberty against northern aggression. McCarthy presented himself as the defender of American freedom while manufacturing suspicion and institutional cowardice. Advocates of the Vietnam War believed withdrawal would imperil the free world. Sincerity varied across these cases. It never once functioned as a safeguard.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Once a person identifies as the defender of a higher cause, the ordinary machinery of self-correction runs in reverse. Opposition stops being disagreement that deserves an answer and becomes obstruction between the country and its rescue. Institutions that resist look captured; inconvenient facts look like propaganda. Setbacks, which ought to prompt revision, read as proof that commitment was insufficient, so the answer to failure is escalation. Good intentions stop being a reason for caution and become evidence of correctness. From inside, the abandonment of judgment registers as resolve.

American political culture accelerates this by issuing every faction the same vocabulary. Elections are struggles for the nation’s soul; legislative disputes are battles between liberty and tyranny; opponents are agents of national destruction. Once that language is standard issue, each side understands itself as the last line of defense, and every generation finds fresh reasons to believe its own emergency is the real one. A republic cannot keep constitutional habits while treating each disagreement as a final battle, because the habits—compromise, procedural restraint, accepting defeat, distinguishing criticism from betrayal—are what an emergency licenses you to suspend.

That is what the sentence gets right, and it is narrower than what it claims. The damage is structural, not partisan. Democratic institutions do not survive because the people inside them choose wisely. They survive, as Popper put it, because they keep the means of discovering that a choice was wrong and reversing it. Citizens convinced they alone represent the nation’s authentic interests become willing to route around those means, and they do it with a clear conscience, because the means have started to look like the obstacle. The injury is to the republic’s capacity to change its mind.

Conviction cannot be rationed, and a country of people holding their beliefs loosely would not have abolished anything. The question worth asking of one’s own certainty is what it would take to move it, and whether that answer has become nothing at all.

Sources:

• Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945)