A Re-enchanting of the World: Political Beliefs in a Time of Social Decay

A Re-enchanting of the World: Political Beliefs in a Time of Social Decay

Steven Livingston

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Keywords: Re-enchantment, conspiracy theories, anomie, conservative dilemma, cross-cutting cleavages, neoliberalism

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Less than two months before the 2024 elections, an astonishing issue leapt onto the public stage. During his September 10^th debate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, Republican candidate Donald Trump asserted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.[1] Though local police officials quickly dismissed the claim as baseless, the assertion took hold all the same. This was in part because other Republicans, including senator and vice presidential candidate JD Vance, promoted the narrative.[2] A YouGov poll conducted in mid-September 2024 found that 46% of respondents believed the claim was “definitely” or “probably” true; among Trump supporters, between 52% and 69% accepted it.[3] Nearly seven in ten Republicans, and roughly half of all Americans, embraced a factually unsound, even bizarre claim made without proof.

How can this be explained? The conventional explanation looks inward, to cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, the failures of individual information processing in a polluted information environment.[4] This paper offers a different account. Public uptake of factually unsound beliefs is, I argue, a familiar human response to disorienting social conditions. The cats-and-dogs story is best understood as something akin to an urban legend or pollution narrative.[5] Such narratives are given political force when amplified by political entrepreneurs who benefit from their uptake in the midst of anomic conditions. To grasp what happened in Springfield, we must look not at mental processes, at least not only at them, but at the social and economic ground on which those processes rest. Following Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, we call the latter an “s-frame” approach. It focuses on power structures, institutions, and cultural disruptions as the proper unit of analysis.[6]

There are two parts to my argument; a supply side and a demand side. On the supply side, conservative parties facing class-based political challenges manufacture cross-cutting cleavage issues that displace economic conflict with identity-based conflict.[7] On the demand side, populations destabilized by a half-century of economic and social disruption search for meaning, purpose, and community in narratives that promise cosmic significance, hidden truths, and belonging. In a sense, conspiratorial beliefs fill heightened cathected demand during unsettled times. This account requires us to move beyond methodological individualism, beyond the assumption that beliefs can be explained by examining individuals abstracted from their social and historical contexts, and toward an s-frame analysis.

My argument proceeds in four stages. The first develops a supply side explanation by drawing on Ziblatt’s conservative dilemma model and the role of cross-cutting cleavage issues. The second stage explains why the dominant cognitive-science approach to political beliefs falls short in its attempt to explain the public embrace of factually unsound beliefs. The third section introduces the demand side with a review of the anomie, cathexis, and the human craving for meaning under conditions of social disruption. The final section makes the case that contemporary conspiratorial beliefs are best understood as a form of re-enchantment. I do not mean this as a metaphor but rather as a substantive claim about the structural features of contemporary political cognition.

The Conservative Dilemma and Cross-Cutting Cleavage Issues

Cross-cutting cleavage issues form political coalitions by reordering social cleavages. These are the durable divisions in society usually formed around religion, class, ethnicity, language, or region.[8] Cleavage issues reassemble coalitions by priming one identity over others. Of greater interest here are issues that weaken class identities in favor of other social signifiers, including race, religion, or ethnicity. Ziblatt’s conservative dilemma model maintains that a conservative party’s ability to remain competitive in a free, fair, and broadly participatory election depends on its capacity to build cross-class coalitions around issues that prime non-economic identities.[9] Why is this so? A conservative party’s closest constituency is composed of economic elites. During periods of broad suffrage and significant economic inequality, conservative parties face a dilemma. They must on the one hand find a way to remain electorally competitive while on the other hand protect the privileges of their most important constituents. One potential solution is found in rigging elections or suspending democracy altogether. A less draconian solution is found in priming elections around issues that diminish the salience of class. Cross-cutting cleavage issues that highlight the alien other, the outsider, the only partially seen threat to order achieves that goal.

Waldner and Lust capture the underlying logic: “As income inequality rises, democracy’s costs for the wealthy increase, lowering the probability of democratic transitions.”[10] Because democracy gives power to the less fortunate, elections centered on material inequality threaten economic elites. The remedy is a more “heterogeneous axis”—identity-based divisions falling along religious, linguistic, racial, or identity markers other than class.[11] Crucially, Waldner and Lust note that “it is not accurate to claim that social divisions are first formed and then influence political processes and structures; political structures and processes also influence group identity formation. Political entrepreneurs, for example, might deliberately facilitate certain forms of group formation and impede others.”[12] Hacker and Pierson make the same point in starker terms: outflanked on economic issues, conservative parties’ survival has depended on introducing or highlighting other social divisions, and those divisions had to be “strong enough to attract durable political support from the working and middle classes.”[13]

This move comes with risks. Emotive cross-cutting cleavage issues can easily get out of hand, as Ziblatt notes with the example of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), the German National People’s Party of the Weimar period. Lacking the dense, disciplined mass-membership party infrastructure that, for example, the British Tories had spent decades building, German conservatives had long relied on auxiliary organizations, including the Agrarian League, the Pan-German League, the Navy League, to do their mobilizing for them. These groups supplied the cross-cutting cleavage frames the party needed, including aggressive nationalism, antisemitism, agrarian protectionism, anti-socialism, and after 1919 a furious revanchism against Versailles. The frames worked, in the sense that they attracted working- and middle-class voters who might otherwise have aligned with other parties. Yet the DNVP could not contain the radicalizing energies it had harness. By the late 1920s the antisemitism that conservatives had treated as a useful electoral instrument found a far more disciplined and ruthless steward in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party).[14] This of course led to a global calamity.

The lesson Ziblatt draws is that cross-cutting cleavages can themselves be dangerous to democratic stability. Any conservative party that is weak enough to need them is rarely strong enough to contain them. This takes us to our core question: What makes a cleavage issue strong, but not too strong? What makes some identity-based frames “durable” but controllable?[15] They must be, as Hacker and Pierson put it, “strong enough to attract durable political support from the working and middle classes,” but not so strong as to promote unspeakable acts of mass political violence directed toward marginalized communities. Racism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and other forms of othering certainly tap into a deeper well of meaning and emotion. But it might be too simple to say that cleavage issues rely on a naturally existing reservoir of bigotry. Some claim, for instance, that race is a socially constructed categorical marker.

Racial essentialism—the idea that racial identity necessarily overwhelms other sources of identity—is not supported by historical or contemporary evidence. As Michelle Alexander notes in The New Jim Crow, racial status hierarchy was invented in colonial America as a means of social control over indentured servants of various racial identities.[16] Racial categories shift over time. Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants were once thought of as belonging to inferior races endowed with immutable inferior traits. Now of course they are thought of as white.[17] Racial labels and hierarchies shift depending on historical and social context, and on power dynamics. Boundaries treated as obvious and essential in one era disappear in the next.

If essentialism does not fully explain why some cleavage frames “stick,” what does? My contention is, first, that protean issues become powerful when they meet a population that has been conditioned to receive them. Second, they become powerful when customary sources of meaning, status, and community have been hollowed out by profound structural change. In these moments, issues of this sort are not only embraced, they are demanded. The conservative dilemma is, in other words, only half of the story. It explains the supply of cleavage frames, but not the demand for them. To explain demand, we must turn outward to the social and economic conditions in which contemporary citizens live their lives.

I mean to emphasize the role of social, economic, and historical conditions in giving issues, such as the cats and dogs story, their emotive weight and meaning. In making this argument I downplay the role of individual cognitive processes. To set up my core argument requires a brief review of what I see as some of the limitations of the cognitive science explanations that might be deployed to explain why so many citizens expressed belief in the preposterous idea that Haitian immigrants were consuming Springfield’s pet population.

The Limits of Methodological Individualism

For at least three generations, cognitive-science concepts have been central to political science scholarship on beliefs. Much of this research centers on bounded rationality, dual-process thinking, cognitive heuristics, and motivated reasoning. Beliefs are said to reflect cognitive biases—predictable patterns of motivated information processing in which people seek information aligned with their priors and reject information that is not. Together, this constellation of theoretical principles forms what we may call the standard model. Motivated reasoning, on this view, leads to polarization, radicalization, and democratic decay.

The standard model rests on a philosophical commitment that is rarely made explicit in the literature: methodological individualism, the position that social phenomena can be explained through analysis of socially unencumbered individuals, each actuated only by their own subjective motivations. Friedrich Hayek put it most directly: “There is no such thing as a collective mind… It is only individuals who think.”[18] Margaret Thatcher’s notorious paraphrase—“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”—translated this premise into a political program.[19]

This commitment may be contrasted with methodological holism, which seeks explanations in structural disruptions, institutions, and cultural patterns. Émile Durkheim’s formulation captures the alternative: “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of the individual consciousness.”[20] Durkheim’s Suicide is the canonical illustration of this approach. He found that rates of suicide vary according to how well people are integrated into society, and social disruptions, such as those caused by rapid urbanization and industrialization, undermine integration and produce upticks in suicide.[21] Contemporary investigations of “deaths of despair” in the United States, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, follow this same holistic logic, pointing to the decline of stable employment, wage stagnation, the erosion of family and community institutions, and the loss of dignity and meaning.[22] Arlie Russell Hochschild’s ethnographic work on the white working class makes a parallel argument; the loss of union jobs and the deindustrialization of communities have generated despair, suicide, and an uptick in conspiratorial beliefs and right-wing politics.[23]

The distinction between individualist and holist approaches is not merely a philosophical preference. Each produces distinct research questions, methods, and presumed solutions. Social psychologists Chater and Loewenstein refer to this as the difference between an i-frame approach (focused on individual cognitive limitations and “nudges” to correct them) and an s-frame approach (focused on maladaptive rules, social disruptions, and institutions).[24] They put the analogy this way:

Seeing individual cognitive limitations as the source of society’s problems is like seeing human physiological limitations as the key to the problems of malnutrition or lack of shelter…. An i-frame perspective would focus on tips to help individuals survive in a hostile world. But human progress has arisen through s-frame changes—the invention and propagation of technologies, economic institutions, and legal and political systems has led to spectacular improvements in the material dimensions of life…. Successful s-frame changes have been transformative in overcoming our physiological frailties.[25]

Worse, an exclusive focus on i-frame solutions can elide attention from s-frame problems. Slum landlords will see illness as arising from poor handwashing or unhygienic food and drink preparation, and well-intentioned behavioral scientists may suggest interventions to increase the use of soap and boiled water. The deeper s-frame reform—quality housing, with heating, sanitation, and safe drinking water—drops out of view.[26] When political analysis frames democratic backsliding primarily as a social media algorithmic feed problem that radicalizes individual users, the structural conditions, including poverty, extreme wealth disparities, broken meritocracy, collapsing public services, and the broad sense of lost hope, never enter the explanation. One goal of this short paper is to foreground the implications of relying on an i-frame explanation of the public uptake of stories such as that concerning Springfield, Ohio, in the fall of 2024.

A second weakness of the standard model lies in the conceptual ambiguity of its central term. What, precisely, is motivation in motivated-reasoning research? In her much-cited 1990 article, Ziva Kunda offered a definition that was openly tautological: “I mean any wish, desire, or preference that concerns the outcome of a given reasoning task, and I do not attempt to address the thorny issue of just how such motives are represented.”[27] When the term is defined this capaciously, almost any effect can be labeled “motivated reasoning.” Inconsistent measurement across studies, ranging from verbal exhortations to be accurate, to small monetary inducements in another, and real-world stimuli drawn from the news of the day in a third, reflects an underlying conceptual incoherence. Each operationalization carries with it a different implicit theory of what motivation is. Susan Fiske diagnosed the problem as early as 1974: “Theoretical constructs in the field are sketchy to the point that they can be operationalized in different ways.”[28] Five decades later, Sanbonmatsu and colleagues note that the field’s aspiration to amass empirical generalizations into coherent theory remains “far from realization.”[29] Though a more thorough development of an alternative conceptualization of motivation goes well beyond the remit of the present paper, I can say that from the s-frame perspective motivations emerge from crises of meaning and purpose in a socially disrupted world.[30]

The standard model of belief explanation is built on shifting ground. Its key construct is poorly specified, its empirical record is inconsistent, and its philosophical commitment to methodological individualism systematically directs attention away from the structural conditions that, on the alternative view, do most of the explanatory work. As DeGrandpre observes, basic science has “internalized the individualism of its parent culture, turning inward in an exploration of universal features of the disembodied mind…. The study of ‘the construction of meaning’ has been replaced…by the study of ‘the processing of information.’”[31] The next two sections take up the alternative directly. I offer a holistic account of why contemporary conditions generate the demand for cleavage-driven beliefs, and an argument that those beliefs are best understood as a form of re-enchantment.

The Demand Side: Anomie, Cathexis, and the Need for Meaning

If the conservative dilemma explains the supply of cross-cutting cleavage issues, what explains the demand? What conditions in the lives of contemporary American citizens make cleavage frames, including manifestly implausible ones, durable enough to organize political behavior?

The most parsimonious answer is that a half-century of neoliberal restructuring has produced exactly the kind of social disorientation Durkheim called anomie: a rupture in the normative integration that ordinarily binds individuals to their communities and to a shared sense of meaning. Of all the issues that could have been talked about in the fall of 2024, the cats-and-dogs story sat at a great distance from the lived realities of the citizens of Ohio and the nation. That June, inflation peaked at 9.1%, hitting hardest those families trying to feed children on a limited budget.[32] Some 13.5 percent of U.S. households—eighteen million households—were food insecure in the months before the election.[33] Bankruptcy filings rose 14.2 percent in 2024,[34] and Ohio’s poverty rate sat just below 14%.[35] Behind these short-term indicators lies a longer structural trend: a 2025 RAND Corporation analysis estimated that since 1975, roughly $79 trillion has been transferred from the bottom 90% of U.S. citizens to the top 1%. In 2023 alone, nearly $4 trillion shifted upward.[36]

Accompanying this redistribution upward has been a contraction of what counts as a public good. A public good is a desired good or service that cannot be efficiently distributed in markets. The category includes national security, policing, firefighting, and the classical example of a lighthouse. Neoliberalism’s fetishization of markets has driven a half-century of efforts to privatize such goods: voucher schools, the steep reduction in taxpayer support for public universities, defense and security contracting (Blackwater being the iconic case), toll roads, repeated attempts to privatize Social Security, and of course healthcare.

The marketization of “everything” extends to individuals themselves, who are thrust into hyper-competitive markets without a meaningful safety net. Wendy Brown speaks of living “in the ruins of neoliberalism.”[37] Byung-Chul Han refers to “burnout society,” the condition in which internalized self-exploitation produces a distinctive set of psychological pathologies, including burnout, depression, and anxiety. Individuals experience themselves as projects to be optimized; work, self-improvement, and identity collapse into one.[38] These are not idiosyncratic personal troubles. They are population-level phenomena that track the structural conditions that produce them. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s ethnographic work in southwest Louisiana and more recently in eastern Kentucky adds a further dimension. Beyond economic precarity and individual psychological pathology, what neoliberal restructuring has stripped away is dignity itself. It robbed citizens of their felt sense of standing as a recognized member of a community whose work, faith, and place once carried social weight. The “deep story” Hochschild’s respondents told her was of patiently waiting in line for the American Dream while others — minorities, immigrants, refugees — were ushered ahead by an indifferent federal government and a culturally distant elite, leaving the line-standers feeling like “strangers in their own land.”[39]

Here it is worth pausing to address an objection that the i-frame tradition is likely to raise: If structural conditions explain belief uptake, why does individual variation exist? Why do some people exposed to the same conditions adopt conspiratorial beliefs while others do not?

This is a fair question, but it is the wrong frame. Holism does not deny individual variation; it denies that individual variation is the right unit of explanation. Durkheim never claimed that anomie causes any particular suicide. He claimed, rather, that anomic conditions raise rates of suicide at the population level. The same logic applies here. The question is not why citizen ‘A’ adopted the cats-and-dogs story while citizen ‘B’ did not; the question is why the population-level rate of belief in factually unsound, cleavage-driven narratives has risen so steeply across so many Western democracies during a period of converging neoliberal disruption. The answer is that anomie is unevenly distributed. It is concentrated in particular regions, such as the “rust belt” in the United States, occupational categories, age cohorts, and community networks—and that individual susceptibility to cleavage frames tracks structural location far more than it tracks any putative cognitive trait.[40] Hochschild’s Louisiana and Kentucky respondents were not randomly distributed across the population; they were embedded in specific declining communities with specific narrative repertoires available to them.

What, then, are anomic populations seeking when they reach for cleavage-driven narratives? The standard model, with its commitment to instrumental rationality, has a hard time framing this question, let alone answering it. To frame it adequately we need a different vocabulary, one that takes seriously the role of meaning in human life. Philosopher Charles Taylor’s notion of cathexis provides such a vocabulary.[41] The term, derived from a Greek root meaning “to hold,” concerns the way values, goods, and meanings grip us—not how we reason about them. The relevant question is not how motivations direct our appraisal of an object; it is why certain values matter to us deeply enough to move us to act, sacrifice, or define ourselves by them. Rational judgment alone is insufficient. Values must be cathected—felt, inhabited, loved, feared, or revered. Their absence is not a matter of cognitive confusion; it is, as Peter Berger put it, an existential crisis:

The ultimate danger of such separation, however, is the danger of meaninglessness. This danger is the nightmare par excellence, in which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, selflessness and madness. Reality and identity are malignantly transformed into meaningless figures of horror.

Such a condition, Berger continues, may be “unbearable to the point where the individual may seek death in preference to it.”[42] The deaths-of-despair literature, when read alongside Berger, becomes legible as something more than an unfortunate actuarial trend. It is a measure of how widely the conditions of meaninglessness have spread in neoliberal America.[43]

Holistically minded thinkers have, of course, warned us about this for a very long time. Berger and Thomas Luckmann argued that social reality is constructed and maintained collectively, and that institutions take on objectivity beyond individual intentions.[44] Niklas Luhmann argued that society consists of self-referential communication systems with autonomy apart from the actors involved in them.[45] Even Foucault, never purely a methodological holist, brackets individual agency in favor of systemic forces. The thread that runs through all of these—and that is missing from the cognitive-science tradition—is the recognition that meaning is a condition of human action, not an optional overlay on it. As Berger puts it: “The socially established nomos may thus be understood, perhaps in its most important aspect, as a shield against terror. Put differently, the most important function of society is nomization.”[46]

To see this dynamic clearly, consider a case in which the conditions of meaninglessness reached an almost unimaginable extreme. The first Ghost Dance ceremonies were held in the spring and summer of 1889 among the Northern Paiute communities near the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada. Following a vision he had during a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, a spiritual leader named Wovoka offered his people what he claimed was a spiritual path out of the pain and incomprehensible misery experienced by his community and by all of the indigenous peoples of North America.[47] The scale of the calamity is worth pausing to register. Demographic research estimates that upwards of 90% of the indigenous population in the Americas died in the centuries following first European contact. Those who survived disease, starvation, and war faced almost total social collapse. Coerced treaties stripped tribes of millions of acres of ancestral homelands. Their sources of subsistence and meaning were quite literally slaughtered: in the early nineteenth century, as many as 60 million bison roamed the American West; by 1890, fewer than 1,000 bison remained.[48]

The Ghost Dance spread rapidly across the Great Basin and Plains, reaching the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, and many other nations. As a spiritual movement it promised healing, renewal, and justice. Its followers believed that through specific ceremonies, including dances, prayers, and a commitment to moral living, the old world would be restored. With sufficient fervor, ancestors would return, the bison herds would once again stretch to the horizon, and traditional ways of life would be reborn. People were told they could “dance a new world into being”:

There would be landslides, earthquakes, and big winds. Hills would pile up on each other. The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man’s ugly things—the stinking new animals, sheep, and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came…. The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent.

Among the Lakota Sioux, some believed that magical “Ghost Shirts,” the garments worn while performing the sacred ceremonies, would shield wearers from the white man’s bullets.[49] The U.S. military responded by killing over 250 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in 1890.[50] Afterward, the Ghost Dance ceremonies were violently repressed.

The Tövusidökadö people and the other indigenous nations did not embrace the Ghost Dance because of their information-processing proclivities. They embraced it in response to unspeakable intergenerational trauma. The belief was, in Berger’s terms, a nomization: a desperate effort to reconstruct meaning under conditions in which the inherited nomos had been destroyed.

The point is not that contemporary American citizens face deprivations comparable to those of 1890 among the remaining indigenous populations of North America. They emphatically do not. The point is that extreme social disruption produces a hunger for narratives that promise renewal, justice, ritual participation, and the return of a lost world. It is a general feature of how human communities respond to anomie. And it is the dynamic for which the standard model, with its laboratory subjects abstracted from history, society, and meaning, has no vocabulary.

Conspiracy as Re-Enchantment

If the demand side is a hunger for meaning under anomic conditions, the question remains: Why does this hunger find its satisfaction, in our moment, specifically in conspiratorial narratives? Religious revival, mutual-aid movements, mass political organizing, and communitarian withdrawal are all available channels for the same underlying need.[51] Why has so much anomic energy flowed into conspiracy? The answer, I want to argue, is that contemporary conspiratorial beliefs are best understood as a form of re-enchantment. I mean this not as a metaphor but as a substantive empirical claim about the structural features of the beliefs in question.

The claim must be set against the standard sociological story, drawn from Max Weber, that modernity is the long history of Entzauberung—the disenchantment of the world. “The fate of our times,” Weber wrote, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”[52] Belief in mysterious, incalculable forces, such as magic, spirits, divine intervention, was supposed to fade as science offered empirical explanations of even ineffable phenomena. The cognitive-science tradition is heir to this story. It implicitly assumes that the rational, information-processing citizen of the modern democracy has left enchantment behind. This almost certainly overstates the case. In The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that modernity never actually eliminated belief in magic, spirits, or the occult.[53] He points out that many of the thinkers credited with disenchanting the world were themselves believers in enchanted phenomena, including Marie Curie, twice a Nobel laureate. She subscribed to a belief in spiritual mediums with the ability to communicate with the dead. Magic never disappeared; it changed form and migrated to new domains: psychology, parapsychology, New Age movements, and Christian mysticism (including the New Apostolic Reformation, with its modern-day apostles, prophets, and territorial spiritual warfare).[54] It also reappeared in literature, politics, nationalism, and technology, with transhumanism being a particularly clear case.[55] A glance at American cable television programming also makes the point. The History Channel and Travel Channel are saturated with programming concerning the occult, ghosts, demonic possession, and adjacent themes.[56]

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien argued, against Weber, that reality cannot be reduced to what can be measured, controlled, or used. Tolkien’s “enchantment” is a moral and imaginative clarity that resists the reduction of the world to power, efficiency, and possession.[57] If enchantment never actually disappeared, then the question of why conspiracy theories grip contemporary populations becomes considerably less mysterious. Conspiracy theories are a form of enchanted cognition, as are the devote Catholic’s belief in divine presence.[58] They share with religious-mythic narratives a recognizable structural grammar:

• A cosmic dualism between a virtuous in-group and a malevolent out-group that might include nefarious global elites, deep-state operatives, immigrants, “groomers,” reptilian shape-shifters. As a result, we are locked in a struggle whose stakes are nothing less than the survival of the world.
• A revelation of hidden truth available to those with eyes to see, contrasted with the false consciousness of the unawakened mass. “Doing your own research” plays the role that scriptural exegesis once did: it is a discipline of personal access to esoteric knowledge. It is being “red pilled” as a form of spiritual transcendence.[59]
• A salvific narrative in which a coming reckoning will set the world right. Q’s “Storm” or the charismatic Christian’s revival and the coming apocalypse offer examples, as does QAnon’s “Great Awakening,” the Great Replacement averted, the deep state exposed, and the children rescued. The structure is eschatological even when the content is nominally secular.
• A ritual participation through which adherents enact and reinforce their belonging by sharing, decoding, signaling, and gathering together in ritual space, including online.[60] Belief is not a private cognitive state; it is a public performance that sustains community.

Why conspiracy rather than other forms of meaning-making? This structural analysis answers this question by showing that the choice is not arbitrary. Conspiracy theories satisfy the cathectic demand more completely than most secular alternatives. Religious revival is one alternative, and it is in fact happening alongside the conspiracy boom (often interwoven with it, as in the New Apostolic Reformation’s overlap with QAnon).[61] If one were to in 2024 attend a Trump political rally and a charismatic Christian rival event, one would be hard pressed to distinguish the two.[62] Conspiracy theories also have a competitive advantage. They can be assembled and consumed without institutional mediation, they offer immediate cosmic significance to ordinary observation, and they provide a community of fellow believers reachable from any device.

Cross-cutting cleavage issues become strong in Hacker and Pierson’s sense, then, when their content can be assembled into this enchanted grammar. The cats-and-dogs story is not strong because it is plausible. It is strong because it is folkloric: the foreigner devours the beloved domestic; the contamination of the home by an alien presence is made visceral; the in-group rallies around a threatened innocent. It is a parable about belonging in a fractured society. Engagement with it is ritualistic. The political work is done in sharing, mocking, decoding, and embracing. One could say that it is a kind of far-right connective action.[63] Those in various levels of anomic crisis find one another online to form digitally constituted organizations offering relief in ritualistic communication.[64] Trump’s role in this is best understood not as that of a misinformation source but as that of a ritual celebrant: he offers the parables, his audience performs the response, and a cathected community is reaffirmed.

This is the sense in which contemporary politics is being re-enchanted. The citizens of the standard model (rational, alert, updating beliefs in light of new information) were always a normative idealization. As Michael Schudson reminds us, while no historical population has ever met that standard, democracy has nevertheless gotten by.[65] What democracy requires is not hyper-informed individuals, but reasonable, alert citizens embedded in strong institutions. The crisis of contemporary liberal democracy is not, fundamentally, a crisis of cognition. It is a crisis of the institutions, communities, and shared meanings in which citizens were once embedded. The half-century of neoliberal restructuring that hollowed out those institutions and communities also hollowed out the conditions under which citizens could, in Schudson’s sense, be reasonable and alert. Into the resulting vacuum has flowed an enchantment that political entrepreneurs are exceptionally well-positioned to supply.

Returning to Springfield

The cats-and-dogs story is, on the account offered here, neither an information failure nor a cognitive bug. It is folklore. It is myth.[66] The foreigner who devours the beloved domestic pets is given political traction by anomic conditions and elevated by political entrepreneurs whose electoral interests align with the suppression of class-based politics. The 67 million viewers of the September 10 debate were not failing to process information correctly. Many of them were participating, however briefly, in a ritual that affirmed an in-group, named an out-group, and drew the boundary of belonging in a country where the more pressing boundaries between those who are secure and insecure, dignified and humiliated, integrated and abandoned, had become harder to distinguish.

To address this condition with i-frame interventions—including calls for better fact-checking, improved media literacy, and well-designed nudges—is to bring soap and boiled water to a slum and to declare the housing crisis solved. The deeper response, the s-frame response, requires reckoning with the structural conditions that have produced the demand for re-enchanted politics in the first place. It requires a return to taking public goods seriously. It requires rebuilding institutions that citizens can rely on to thrive or at least to have a decent life. It requires a politics that does not require the manufacture of cleavage frames in order for elites to remain electorally competitive. These are not modest tasks. But they are the tasks that follow from taking seriously the proposition that beliefs are not, in the first instance, things that happen inside individual heads. They are things that happen between people, in communities, under conditions that political and economic structures shape. To re-enchant the world is, in the end, what humans do in response to disenchantment. The question is not whether contemporary citizens will reach for re-enchantment. They already have. The question is what kinds of meaning, what kinds of community, and what kinds of political institutions will be available for them to reach toward.

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[1] Jeff Cercone, “Trump Repeats Baseless Claims that Haitian Immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are Eating Pets,” Politifact, September 11, 2024, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/sep/11/donald-trump/trump-repeats-baseless-claims-that-haitian-immigra/.

[2] Huo Jingnan and Jasmine Garsd, “JD Vance Spreads Debunked Claims about Haitian Immigrants Eating Pets,” NPR, September 10, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5107320/jd-vance-springfield-ohio-haitians-pets; Sarah Ellison and Jeremy B. Merrill, “Anatomy of a Racist Smear: How False Claims of Pet-Eating Immigrants Caught on,” The Washington Post, September 11, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/11/anatomy-racist-smear-how-false-claims-pet-eating-immigrants-caught/.

[3] YouGov, “Half of Americans believe rumors about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs,” poll conducted September 13–17, 2024, today.yougov.com; Martha McHardy, “More Than Half of Trump Voters Believe Haitians Are Eating Pets: Poll,” Newsweek, September 17, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-republicans-haitian-migrants-eating-pets-poll-1954875.

[4] For a review, see Steven Livingston and Michael Miller, “Considering the Assumptions of the Technocentric Model of Democratic Flourishing and Decay,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4 no. 3 (Fall 2024): 139-160, https://doi.org/10.53483/XCQZ3584.

[5] Regarding urban legends, see Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Jan Harold Brunvand, Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). For pollution narratives, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

[6] Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, “The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46 (September 5, 2022):e147, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22002023. See also Chater and Loewenstein, It’s on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems, (New York: Basic Venture, a division of Hachette Book Group, 2026).

[7] Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139030335.

[8] Robert E. Goodin, “Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Social Conflict,” British Journal of Political Science, 5 no. 4 (1975):516-519,  https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712340000836X; Joel Sawat Selway, “The Measurement of Cross-cutting Cleavages and Other Multidimensional Cleavage Structures,” Political Analysis. 19 no. 1 (2011):48-65. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpq036.

[9] On this point, see also Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore, (MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

[10] David Waldner and Ellen Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018): 93–113, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050517-114628.

[11] Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome Change.”

[12] Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome Change.”

[13] Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (New York: Liveright, 2020).

[14] Larry Eugene Jones, The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism from 1918 to 1933, (Berghahn Books, 2014).

[15] Of course, at the heart of Ziblatt’s analysis is the question of party durability. Is the conservative party capable of effective gatekeeping of radical ideologies and actors? For the moment, we hold party gatekeeping capacity constant to look more closely at the nature of cross-cutting cleavage issues.

[16] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: The New Press, 2012).

[17] See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America, (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

[18] F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955), 53.

[19] Margaret Thatcher, ‘interview with Douglas Keay,” Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987 (published October 31, 1987).

[20] Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method [1895], trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982), 134.

[21] Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology [1897], trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951).

[22] Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

[23] Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016).

[24] Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, “The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46 (2023): e147.

[25] Chater and Loewenstein, p. 2

[26] Chater and Loewenstein, p. 2.

[27] Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 480.

[28] Donald W. Fiske, “The Limits for the Conventional Science of Personality,” Journal of Personality 42, no. 1 (1974): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1974.tb00553.x.

[29] Cronbach, L. J. (1975). Beyond the Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology. American Psychologist, 30(2), 116–127. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076829, p. 21; David M. Sanbonmatsu, Becky Neufeld, and Steven S. Posavac, “There is No Theory Crisis in Psychological Science,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, (2025), https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000301.

[30] To develop this argument, one would turn to one or more of these seminal works: Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, trans. Ilse Lasch, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, (New York: Free Press, 1973); Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, (New York: Random House, 2015); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951); Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner, (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).

[31] The passage quoted draws on Jerome Bruner’s distinction between the construction of meaning and the processing of information.

[32] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, June 2022 release.

[33] Matthew P. Rabbitt, Madeline Reed-Jones, Laura J. Hales, and Michael P. Burke, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2023,” Economic Research Report ERR-337 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, September 2024).

[34] Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, “Bankruptcy Filings Rise 14.2 Percent,” press release, January 2025.

[35] U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, Ohio, 2023.

[36] Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018, WR-A516-1 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020), with subsequent updates through 2025. [Updated reference to be verified.]

[37] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

[38] Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

[39] Arlie Russell Hochschild. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press; Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, (New York: The New Press, 2024).

[40] See Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the A Party, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023); Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Jennifer M. Silva, We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[41] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

[42] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 22.

[43] Berger, The Sacred Canopy, p. 22.

[44] Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).

[45] Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

[46] Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 22.

[47] James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report 14, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896).

[48] Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[49] Quoted in John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932); see also Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion.

[50] Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion, esp. Ch. 13.

[51] Communal withdrawal has been a prominent solution among postliberal intellectuals. See for example Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, (New York: Sentinel, 2017); Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2025).

[52]Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” [1917/1919], in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155.

[53] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

[54] Simon Critchley, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy, (London: Profile Books, 2014). Regarding the New Apostolic Reformation, see Sean McCloud, American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); see also McCloud, Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies, University of North Carolina Press, 2007); André Gagné, American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times, (London: Routledge, 2024).

[55] Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015).

[56] See https://www.history.com/shows and https://www.travelchannel.com/

[57] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955); J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” [1947], in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983).

[58] Mark M. Gray, Eucharistic Beliefs: A National Survey of Adult Catholics, commissioned by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate [CARA], 2023); Timothy P. O’Malley, “The Theological Foundations of Eucharistic Beliefs: A New National Survey of Adult Catholics,” Church Life Journal, October 2023, University of Notre Dame. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-theological-foundations-of-eucharistic-beliefs-a-national-survey-of-adult-catholics/.

[59] “Red pilled” is slang for have adopted a belief in a reveal a “hidden” truth. It is primarily used within the manosphere and far-right circles and signifies accepting beliefs like antifeminism, misogyny, or white supremacy. The term originates from The Matrix (1999) to describe waking up to a harsh reality, often referring to shifting from liberal to conservative or extremist views.

[60] Steven Livingston and Babak Bahador, “Propaganda Feedback Loops as Communication Rituals: Hate Speech on Talk Radio,” Media, Culture & Society, 47 no. 6 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251331809.

[61] Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), “The Persistence of QAnon in the Post-Trump Era: An Analysis of Who Believes the Conspiracies,” February 24, 2022, https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/PRRI-Feb-2022-Qanon-final.pdf; PRRI, “How Charismatic and Pentecostal Conservatives Are Shaping the American Right Wing of Today,” October 21, 2024, https://prri.org/spotlight/how-charismatic-and-pentecostal-conservatives-are-shaping-the-american-right-wing-of-today/.

[62] NPR, “Some Christians Have Been Primed for a Kind of Religious Revival Centered on Trump,” Morning Edition, August 15, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2024/08/15/nx-s1-4926507/some-christians-have-been-primed-for-a-kind-of-religious-revival-centered-on-trump; Sarah Posner, “The Trump Revival,” The Nation, April 15, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-evangelicals-nar/; Molly Olmstead, “I Went to a Pro-Trump Christian Revival. It Changed My Understanding of January 6,” Slate, September 25, 2024, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/donald-trump-2024-president-election-shooting-christians.html.

[63] W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, “Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy: Connective Action and the Rise of Illiberalism,” Perspectives on Politics 23 no. 4 (2025):1362-1381. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724002123.

[64] Livingston and Bahador, 2025.

[65] Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998).

[66] W. Lance Bennett, “Myth, Ritual, and Political Control,” Journal of Communication, 30 (1980): 166-179. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1980.tb02028.x.