Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I've written a great deal over the past few years about the ability of the Republican Right to manipulate white male working class anger towards their own ends, while timid corporate Democrats turn their backs upon their New Deal roots and offer us the "passionate" centrism of the Clinton's.
What follows below was my response to a draft essay by Bill Greider which has yet to appear in The Nation magazine. That was the trigger at least, but I am focused on Sheldon S. Wolin's most recent book, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, and its roots in his 2001 book, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds."
I hope you can see by my selection of quotes from that 2001 book how much the Republican Party we saw on stage on Sept. 16th draws upon themes from Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," the conscious manipulation of religion to restrain economic egalitarianism, and how Tocqueville was able to import aristocratic values and graft them onto the anti-majoritarian mechanisms that Madison built our Constitution around.
Best,
bill of rights
I thought I'd share a few thoughts with you all in the wake of the content of Bill's essay just sent out yesterday, which I liked.
It makes working class culture and its political implications the center of attention, and raises my old theme of political passion front and center: why has the Right been able to inject more of it - political passion - to mobilize working class voters, white ones, largely men, to their cultural causes while the Democrats (and democrats) have been unable to release comparable and more constructive passions around greater equality in all its meanings: better pay, more say in the workplace, genuine working class participatory democratic institutions controlled not by Dem. party surrogates (like Trumka) but genuine "rank and file leaders"?
It is in the spirit of answering those question that I offer the following passages from Sheldon Wolin's 2001 book, little known, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds" from the chapter entitled "The Democratization of Culture."
I won't assume, but rather suspect, that if your political education inside high school and college classrooms was like mine in post-World War II America, you’ve had a heavy dose of "Tocqueville." Wolin brings you his biography and deep insights into how his personal life translated into his renderings upon American democracy. The level of conscious manipulation to restore aristocracy to its rightful influences over the age's inclination to a more democratic culture is shocking, to say the least, and helps explain elite America's love of the author.
The social utility of religion, exercised not so much from the pulpit but via the role of American women inside the family, ought to rile up any feminist reading this. And keep in mind the title of the book: Tocqueville is using America as a living laboratory for the age, but more than half the purpose is to formulate morals and a guidebook for France, which has gone through a Revolution more intense and violent than our own. Most of these passages from the great Frenchman are from the lesser known and read Volume II, Democracy in America. Now I'll keep quiet and let Wolin do the presentations for us:
"Although Tocqueville had identified passion as the driving force of great actions and deplored its absence from politics, now, when the passions of the lower social orders were stirring, he became fixated upon the 'ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible' passion for equality. His countrymen, he complained, would tolerate 'poverty, servitude and barbarism' rather than 'endure aristocracy."
"The church’s survival was vital to perpetuating antimodernist principles, especially ideals of the eternal and permanent, but religion had become too important to be left to the church alone."
"Democratic passion was, in part, the 'anxious longing' of disconnected individuals and, in part, an obsession with material good that produces 'a complete and brutal indifference to the future.' Democracy has inverted the Enlightenment faith in progress and its implicit futurist orientation. The liberated moderns are absorbed in the enjoyment of the present and its possibilities, and indifferent to the future. Having renounced the past and encouraged by modern skepticism to doubt traditional beliefs about an afterlife and the need to prepare for it in the present, 'they give themselves over completely to the desires of the moment.' They live 'amidst the tumult of democracy,' "an immense competition open to all' where 'wealth is accumulated or lost in a moment' and where the 'the image of chance in all its form' dominates the human mind. The resulting 'social instability encourages the natural instability of desires.'"
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Tocqueville's new model woman was constructed for one purpose, to control democratic man without challenging his 'authority.' When the free and independent girl enters marriage - her unquestioned destiny - she assumes the life the European girl had known from the beginning, 'virtually a cloister.' Rule and regularity are insisted upon, Tocqueville explains, because among Puritan-influenced people and trading nations 'regularity' of life is taken to be a sign of 'purity of morals.'...the end result, in Tocqueville's view, would be 'timid men and unseemly women.' To avoid that dilemma Tocqueville justifies a double standard of sexual freedom. Men are not likely to be chaste; hence, 'courtesans' are inevitable and are less damaging to society than 'intrigues.' Fortunately, the democratic obsession with business renders men less romantic and diminishes sexual appetites.'"
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The very point of Tocqueville's conception of a culture whose purpose was to make democracy safe for the world was not to prepare democratic man for political action but to neutralize him...At a historical juncture when democracy seems the only palatable political form, culture becomes the stuff of political stratagems for insuring a kind of tolerable democracy through the establishing of a domain where the new bourgeois society feels unconfident and yearns to be edified while the poor are excluded from what they do not 'appreciate.' 'Culture' thus becomes the domain of the discourse of political reversal." {Editor's note: my emphasis - billofrights}
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