When Caspar David Friedrich completed Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, or Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, in 1818, it “was not well received.” So says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above, which focuses on Friedrich’s most famous painting. In the artist’s lifetime, the Wanderer in fact “marked the gradual decline of Friedrich’s fortunes.” He withdrew from society, and in 1835, “he suffered a stroke that left the left side of his body effectively paralyzed, effectively ending his career.” How, over the centuries since, did this once-ill-fated painting become so iconic that many of us now see it referenced every few weeks?

Friedrich had known popular and critical scorn before. His first major commission, painted in 1808, was “an altarpiece which shows a cross in profile at the top of a mountain, alone and surrounded by pine trees. Hard for us to understand now, but it caused a huge scandal.” This owed in part to the lack of traditional perspective in its composition, which presaged the feeling of boundlessness — overlaid with “rolling mists and fogs” — that would characterize his later work. But more to the point, “landscape had never been considered a suitable genre for overtly religious themes. And of course, normally the crucifixion is shown as a human narrative populated by human figures, not Christ dying alone.”

The key to understanding Neuhaus is to see him as a defender of a consensus, uniting commitments to both Christianity and liberalism, which he believed to be rooted firmly in American history and the truth about human society. Its central proposition, which Neuhaus defended in over 20 books and hundreds of articles, holds that American democracy depends on the moral beliefs and practices of religious believers. Neuhaus paired this with a second and more original thesis. He held that liberalism is itself endangered by those discouraging traditional religious voices from public deliberation. Secular liberalism is not a tautology, he maintained; it is a contradiction.

Neuhaus was this movement’s sharpest critic and keenest observer, as evidenced by his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, which examined the cultural conflicts that would define our politics for a generation. Neuhaus did more, however, than foresee the rise of secularist politics. He undertook the long work of articulating an alternative “public philosophy” and assembling an ecumenical network committed to its refinement and dissemination. Liberalism, he proposed, is founded on truths embedded in the American experience that can be discerned by any reasonable person: that human beings possess powers of rational deliberation, that these same powers make human community and self-government possible, and that both are grounded in the rights we possess from nature and God — the ultimate ground of human freedom and limited government.

More than half a decade after Neuhaus’s passing, the growing estrangement of both left and right from his vision makes it worth revisiting — and perhaps proposing anew.

Notwithstanding some headline results to the contrary, all three datasets show that the tax system has become more progressive and more redistributive over the last several decades, with much of that change occurring in recent years. This increase in redistribution is driven primarily by an increase in transfers to households in the bottom half of the income distribution which is missed by a focus on the top 1%.

The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about individual entitlements and America’s economic decline that are driving a toxic ‘doom politics’ of cynicism and resentment, while also neglecting the needs of actually poor Americans.

Two misunderstandings in particular seem to drive the mistake: that everything is more expensive these days, and that the rich took all the money.