Comments on: James Poulos Says Something Very Important

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:23:41 +0000

“When they die, aristocracies explode; democracies deflate.”

“When it is demolished, an aristocracy bursts into a thousand vigorous individuals shooting violently across history; a democracy, when it disappears, deflates like a rubber ball.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

By: James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:38:17 +0000

By coincidence, I’ve been thinking about this very question. I’m not sure I follow the distinctions Polus makes — or rather, I would question the claims he’s making about the necessity of Rieff here. But let me just issue a basic assent: Tocqueville’s individualism dissolves societies into the soft but real bonds of the nuclear family (with a select few chosen others). What he seems not to have envisioned was that even these bonds could be dissolved and a true or pure individualism could come into being, in which the person knocks about the vast homogenous space of administered society like the lethargic irradiated sperm of Homer J. Simpson. It required, I suspect, not just the triumph of the therapeutic but the triumph of the headphone (or ear bud) to make this possible. Again, I’m not nitpicked and calling into question his argument (which is a good’n). I just think Tocqueville’s analysis is correct, save that the technocratic divisions he saw coming into being have continued to develop beyond what he could imagine.

There’s more to Polus’ argument, too, which I must digest.

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:01:24 +0000

I find it to be a kind of willful lark that Poulos would suggest that the Neo-conservatives are chary of despotism. The neo-conservatives, as a general rule, were kept on as properly controlled think tankers in earlier eras, able philosophers who knew how to say artistically that the world was coming to an end . However, they were never accorded much real power directly, until the most despotic Executive in recent years took the helm and found the nation steeped in a state of quivering fear after 9/11. Neo-Conservatives, always adept at describing all manner of enemy were fully embraced and given the megaphone of empire and revenge. Their pin striped and perfumed baying for war has yet to abate and so to assert that they are somehow pro-liberty is to deal a wallop of a fable.

But, to be clear, barbarism is hardly gone and it remains the most bi-partisan default mode of the naked ape.

Tocqueville remains a remarkably perceptive analyst of the American arch type but something happened to us during this era of the glistening little electric box in every rumpus room…..we began to conduct ourselves in a manner much like our opposite bookend on the other side of Europe, the Russians. We began to imitate. Not Europe so much as Russia did but ourselves, a kind of caricatured, packaged and homogenized American. We continue to split infinity with the mimicry and a Media-Political Circus promulgates it into law and quarterly report. Hence, the confusion….a person makes a living as a mimic, reality tends to become alien. As they say, Buy the ticket and take the ride.