When Stanford University’s Larry Diamond worried about a “crisis in the liberal democratic order,” he called attention to a “zeitgeist” in which “around the world, many democracies were hanging by a thread and aspiring autocrats were preparing more savage assaults on what remained of freedom.” Diamond’s argument was powerful and, perhaps to some, persuasive. But let’s face it. Zeitgeist is not a thing, not a material object. Like its first cousin, culture, zeitgeist is a conceptual shortcut for offering an interpretation of a prevailing spirit or mood. Deploying the term “zeitgeist” amounts to an attempt to amass the thoughts and behaviors of individuals into a coherent whole and then to proceed as if that whole was a real thing.