Notes on the Great Realignment
"As an exercise in argumentative audacity, Schoenfeld’s argument deserves some sort of award. But the truth is that the guiding spirit of Legutko’s book (and I believe the same can be said for Deneen’s) is not Herbert Marcuse but Alexis de Tocqueville, especially his analysis of “democratic despotism” which flows from what we today would call the “deep state” or the “administrative state.” Among the epigraphs that preface his book, Legutko features a famous bit from Democracy in America that outlines this threat. I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain . . . I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. . . . Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. It is interesting to note that the first part of this passage also serves as an epigraph for Jacob Talmon’s classic The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (out of print, but not, I hope, for long). Talmon makes a critical distinction between liberal and totalitarian democracies. The essential difference between the two, he writes, is in their “different attitudes to politics.” The liberal approach assumes politics to be a matter of trial and error, and regards political systems as pragmatic contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. It also recognizes a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavor, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics. By contrast, the totalitarian version of democracy is “based upon the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics. It may be called political Messianism in the sense that it postulates a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive.” Communism was one form of this Messianism. The liberal consensus that Francis Fukuyama described in The End of History is another, kinder, gentler form. And it is precisely that liberalism—the increasingly bureaucratic and illiberal liberalism espoused by the administrative state—that politicians like Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro have arisen to challenge. Talmon was on to something deep, I believe, when he identified “the paradox of freedom” as the recognition that freedom is unfree so long as it is wed to “an exclusive pattern of social existence, even if this pattern aims at the maximum of social justice and security.” The key is this: Do we take “men as they are” and look to politics to work from there? Or do we insist upon treating men “as they were meant to be, and would be, given the proper conditions”?" Indeed, Godzilla/Nemesis Trump has come because we've reached peak leviathan state, Deep State, totalitarian bureaucratic state. The state, as it is currently understood, is not simply dysfunctional, it is non-functional. The state has become too big, too hubristic, too totalitarian to perform the basic duties it was designed to perform. "The real battle that has been joined—and it is a battle that is forging a great political realignment—is not between virtuous progressive knights riding the steeds of liberalism, on the one hand, and the atavistic forces of untutored darkness represented by “populism,” on the other. The real battle is between two views of liberty. One is a parochial view that affirms tradition, local affection, and the subordination of politics to the ordinary business of life. The other is more ambitious but more abstract. It seeks nothing less than to boost us all up to that plane of enlightenment from which all self-interested actions look petty, if not criminal, and through which mankind as a whole (but not alas individual men) may hope for whatever salvation secularism leavened by utilitarianism may provide. We are still in the opening sallies of the Great Realignment. Many old alliances will be broken, many new ones formed. I expect a lot of heat, and even more smoke. I hope that there will also be at least occasional flashes of light." At the end of this battle, the world will be changed from our international institutions to our federal agencies and how they are formed and how they function, to our states, and even to the formation and construction of our corporations and entities. Leviathan bureaucracy has failed; it needs replacement. The industrial model is in decline and will soon be at its end; it needs replacement. Our educational institutions were designed to serve the industrial model with K-12 designed to prepare workers for industrial occupations while higher education was designed to prepare most graduates to become the managers of industry. Without the industrial model, education is adrift; it needs reformation. We stand at the edge of a great change. Progressives want us to walk back to the old system, breathe life back into in and allow them to keep the corrupt systems and practices they have build over the decades. But this cannot work. None of our systems function and their functioning is only breaking down more over time. What we need is to do the difficult and embrace the change, accept that if we allow the change to happen organically without government direction or control, we will end up with a better more equitable, safer, and more prosperous socio-economic system. The politicians realize this means reformation of government and the loss of the graft and corruption they have come to feed on. So they fight to keep their benefits, and we should fight to separate them from their benefits. It is long past time to "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!"
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