The endless self-radicalization of democracy predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two hundred years ago has come to pass with unerring and unnerving accuracy.

The woke closer to home are self-described “progressives” as well, quick to label those who disagree with them as “reactionaries,” “racists,” and “oppressors,” who must be silenced, shamed, and “canceled” in order to promote a fictive liberation and justice, to bury “racism,” “colonialism,” “sexism,” and “transphobia” once and for all.

That Third Rider has indeed come to threaten and repress, as Kolnai feared, all “essential opposition” to Autonomous Man, the human being defined by his desire to emancipate himself from the “alien powers” (as Marx called them) that subjugate Man. Included in these powers are all natural, transcendent, and inherited limits to human will.

As Leo Strauss wrote around the same time in his illuminating 1953 essay “Progress or Return,” the crucial error, the root of the evil, was the replacement of the once-venerable distinction between “good and evil” with the ever-shifting “distinction” between “progress and reaction.”2