So here’s what I’ve written so far about Tocqueville for tomorrow’s panel at 8 (just in case you wont be there):

Tocqueville called the effect of democracy on the heart individualism—by which he meant apathetic withdrawal from larger communities into a narrow circle of friends and family.

We democrats believe that love stinks (I wanted to say sucks in honor of Kelly Clarkson and to appeal to young people, but that would be wrong) because it turns us into suckers. Our intention, to enhance our safety and secure our rights, is to have all our connections with other persons be governed by calculation and consent. Otherwise, we’ll surrender to their rule, be subject to their control. The American democrat brags, with his moral doctrine of self-interest rightly understood, that he is so emotionally free that he never allows his heart to trump his mind or clear calculation about his interests.

So we democrats resist losing ourselves or thinking of ourselves of parts of personal wholes—of families, friendships, countries, personal religions, and so forth. And we certainly, in the name of freedom and equality, refuse to submit to personal authority—to politicians, priests, poets, philosophers, professors, and so forth.

The danger, Tocqueville thought, was that our personal isolation would make us too anxious and lonely. Our assertion of freedom is based on the good news that no one is better than ME. But the corresponding bad news is that I’m no better than anyone else. So I have no point of view that trumps the pressures from the huge impersonal forces that surround me.

In my flight from personal authority I end up submitting to impersonal forces—to public opinion (which comes from no one in particular), to popular science (promulgated by people who begin sentences not with “I think” but “studies show”), to technology, and to History. There’s no denying, as Tocqueville says, that impersonal forces explain more and more—and personal choice less and less—about what happens in democratic times.

Apathetic withdrawal leads to self-surrender. And the culmination of self-surrender, Tocqueville feared, would be schoolmarmish, soft administrative despotism, to a providential authority that would take the burden of our personal futures—of being beings totally on our own in a hostile environment—off our hands. So insofar as we can say that being human is all about being personally responsible for one’s own destiny, the culmination of individualism is a kind of lapse into apathetic subhumanity.

For me, good news is that Tocqueville underestimated how radically individualistic apathetic withdrawal would be. And so he didn’t understand that individualism would make soft despotism unsustainable over the long term. The future of humanity is not as threatened by democracy as he sometimes feared.

Tocqueville thought that the self-centered individual would lose all concern with past and future. But he didn’t think he would actually stop thinking of himself as a being to be replaced. The American man he described is very unerotic and not much of a family man, but he still manages to have a wife and kids. And their constant presence in his little house manages to arouse some real love in him. Tocqueville assumed that we’d remain social enough to be parents and children. His worry was the disappearance of active citizens, not the disappearance of children.

But maybe the biggest issue concerning the sustainability of liberal democracies today has to with people becoming so emotionally withdrawn or so self-centered that they quite consciously refuse to think of themselves as beings to be replaced. As Tocqueville would have appreciated, demographic sustainability is not that big an issue in our country yet because of the social, Darwinian behavior of our observant religious believers. But everywhere in the West (and Japan) we can see that people, on average, are living longer and longer and having fewer and fewer children.

From an individual point of view, what we have here is good news. It’s good to live a long time: At the turn of the 20th century, the average American lived until about 49, now that number is about 80. We have a new birth of freedom in a post-reproductive and for women postmenopausal generation that evolutionary theorists have a hard time explaining. And of course for individuals it’s good that various contraceptive inventions have made us so pro-choice when it comes to being tied down by children. But what’s good for the individual might be bad for the species or bad for the country or too not according to nature. Let’s face it, safe sex–or bourgeois sex–just can’t be all that erotic, and we envy the other, more natural species who don’t know about it.

Even with all our whining about those economic regulations, a powerful case can be made that people’s rights are, on balance, better protected than ever. Our libertarians, such as Randy Barnett, really appreciate the expansion of personal liberty narrative of Lawrence v. Texas, and that Lockean tale of liberation might really the most convincing narrative of our nation’s history.

Some lover of human liberty might even cheer, with some perversity, that our success in living longer and more free of children has made our social safety net unsustainable. And there’s nothing even ObamaCare can do about that over the long term. The road to serfdom can’t ever make it to serfdom. Serfdom we can believe in has to be bankrolled by lots of productive young people.

THERE’S MORE, but nothing that will surprise YOU.

1. Also appearing in the most recent PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE is a most relevant and insightful article by one of our country’s most distinguished public intellectuals, Irving Louis Horowitz: “Legalism as an Executive Ideology: Foundations of Barack Obama’s Leadership Style” AND Justin Dyer’s “Revisiting Dred Scott: Prudence, Providence, and the Limits of Judicial Statesmanship.” According to Dyer, “By wedding self-evident truths in the Declaration to a providentially ordered universe and by making natural rights derivative of the image of God in man, the very logic of American constitutionalism was given a theological meaning.” Connecting this well-supported insight to what I said about David Walsh above, we can see why Chesterton was such a big admirer of Lincoln and why liberal theory [such as the Declaration's self-evident paragraph], in the hands of the poetic statesman, is shown, as Walsh says, to be better than it knows.

2. You will be able to pick up a sample copy of PPS at the Routledge booth as the APSA meeting. My MODERN AND AMERICAN DIGNITY isn’t out yet, but it will be very soon. And I can’t figure out why more of you haven’t taken advantage of the pre-publication special ($17.79 for a beautiful hardback) on AMAZON. I will have to shamelessly self-promote its contents soon.

3. Someone has asked why I haven’t made GLENN BECK a strange and stupid conservative trend. Well, for one thing, Glenn is strange but not stupid. (Sarah Palin is not even particularly strange and not stupid–although still fairly ignorant and inexperienced [and remarkably savvy].) Do I think Glenn is the great founder of some civic theological, libertarian, Founderistic, anti-Progressive movement to restore America’s honor, trust, treasure, etc.? No. Do I think DIVINE PROVIDENCE guided him to choose the day on which to hold his rally? No. Do I think it’s a great idea to attempt to refocus the inspiration of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement away from the injustices done to African-Americans and towward the oppression we all suffer from a century of Progressive dominance? No. Do I think Glenn exaggerates–sometimes in a creepy way–the conspiratorial evildoing of President Obama, Progressives, liberals, and people who use “social justice” in a sentence. Yes. Do I think the New Deal was basically unconstitutional? No. Can I stand to watch his show? No. Do I think I’m better than him because I’m a refined postmodern conservative who’s completely ineffectual? No. Do I share many of the concerns of many of his followers? Yes. Do I think refined and religious conservatives should stop whining about him and realize he’s filling a vacuum created by the absence of better conservative popular leadership. Yes. Do I know how many people really showed up for his rally? No. Do I care? No. Do I think the mainstream media is lowballing the number? Yes.

So it’s been called to my attention that I forgot to shamelessly promote the July-September issue of PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE.

Well, it’s one of the best issues ever. There’s a symposium on the dazzling and genuinely original political thought of David Walsh, edited by Steve McGuire. All the contributions are worthy, but those by Tim Fuller and our Ralph Hancock are actually deep and rich contributions to political thought (as a whole) today.

The symposium includes Walsh’s “Response to Symposiasts,” which is all you need to read to become convinced that he deserves to be ranked among the finest thinkers around right now. Contrary to the view that modern liberalism is all about techno-domination, commodification, wastelands and all that, Walsh writes: “The logic of respect for persons is inexorable…At their core liberal political principles enshrine the transcendent dignity and worth of every human being. The person is the one inexhaustible center of meaning and value in the whole universe. The imago Dei may not be so regularly pronounced, but its undertow remains inescapable. In the final analysis it is because the inspirations of liberal theory exceed its capacity for articulation that it cannot be fully explicated.”

If you think about it, Strauss and Walsh are on opposite extremes when it comes to this modern/personal issue here, and there’s some connection between Walsh and (in a more moderate and less sanguine form) our philosopher-pope’s efforts to reinvigorate the personal logos. You could also think here of Chesterton’s interpretation of our Declaration of Independence, showing that it depends upon a center of significance in the universe that gives each person equal significance (or something not articulated at all by Locke).

But here’s Ralph’s challenge to what might seem to be Walsh’s Christian existentialism: “the Christian and modern evocation of the mystery of personal existence must not lose touch with the insuperable bond between the good of the soul and the good of the city. And a concern for this bond would lead us back, in turn, to Kant’s ‘fretting’ over the link between the moral law within and the starry heavens above. And such fretting might, further, lead us to consider how ‘practical’ it was of he ancients to praise the supremacy of ‘theory.’”

There’s so much more to say about this great issue. But I gotta go to work.

People are taking Ayn Rand seriously–as a guide to who we are and what we’re supposed to do–again. But she has to be the worst self-help guide ever. As this pithy but deep analysis shows, she’s all about self-deceptive and self-destructive liberation from who we are by nature, from genuinely personal or “relational” love for a “master class” meritocracy based on pure productivity.

Entrepreneurs ain’t gods or even the best of men or women, which is not to say I have anything against them or lack gratitude for what they do for us. Randianism is some strange mixture of Marxian (about the uninhibited life at the end of history) and Nietzschean fantasies that can’t help but have some appeal to the vanity of the youthful and inexperienced. But it’s hard to believe real grown ups–who are allegedly devoted to the laws of nature and Nature’s God–are buying this stuff these days.

So I thought I’d link the astute Pete S.’s analysis on why Obama will probably prevail in 2012, even if the economy doesn’t rebound in some Reaganesque way. Pete, ever the statesman, adds that the Republicans could still win with a persuasive message, an articulate, attractive, and able candidate, and a superior ground game. A lot of “ifs” there, of course.

The best book on public policy this year, of course, is William Voegeli’s NEVER ENOUGH. He describes a moment in Clinton’s second term when the president and Speaker Gingrich “were able to agree on a framework for changing Social Security and Medicare because of an opportunity, the surprising appearance of federal budget surpluses in Clinton’s second term.” The moment quickly passed, of course, because of the revelation of the president’s creation of unprecedented opportunities for service for an intern and Gingrich’s need to feign outrage at the revelation.

Could there be such a moment in Obama’s presidency? Is he as smart and flexible as the man from Hope? Is there a Republican leader in Congress of the pay grade (and flexibility) of Newt in his prime? The opportunity, of course, won’t be a surprising surplus. But maybe a dangerously intractable deficit–combined with undeniable and irreversible demographic trends–might provide a similar opportunity for trans-partisan statesmanship and genuinely intelligent compromise. Voegeli’s book provides some guidance for such compromise–which begins with the insight that the entitlements of the welfare state are neither unconstitutional nor an inalienable right.

So here’s a dramatically out-of-context excerpt from my Whitman presentation.

Whitman explains that “the democratic republican principle” is “the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards.” So that principle is less about perfecting the institutions of government than of being “the only effectual method of surely, however slowly, training people on a large scale to voluntarily ruling and managing themselves.” And that kind of perfection is “the ultimate aim of political and all other development.” Democratic progress is “to gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum,” because people will be trained or habituated to ruling themselves. “What is independence,” Whitman writes, “but “freedom from all yokes and bonds except those of one’s own being?”

But Whitman doesn’t join the libertarian or the Marxist in holding that the ultimate aim of modern freedom is the withering away of the state for each person’s free, unobsessive pursuit of private goals or whims. Political life and political devotion are indispensable features in the development of self-discipline or character. “Political democracy,” he explains, “supplies a training-school for making first-class men.” Political contests are “life’s gymnasium” for “freedom’s athletes,” and they satisfy their desire for action, “irrespective of success.” There’s nothing “grander,” after all, “than a well-contested American national election.” Whitman often claims that there has to be lots for the democratic person to do to satisfy his athletic desire for action and display his greatness or have an outlet for his pride.

The withering away of the state would be the withering away of political greatness, of part of what’s intrinsic to personal identity. It’s the contest—or not just heart-enlarging affection—that each of us can’t help but crave, and political democracy’s distinctiveness is training us all to be actors on the political stage. The constant political danger, Whitman cautions, is that “savage, wolfish parties,” obeying “no law but their own will,” become so combative that they lose contact with “overarching American ideas” and “equal brotherhood.” But who can deny that contests among brothers are an indispensable feature of character development? Brotherhood surely is consistent enough with strong personal identity and considerable self-assertiveness.

Whitman doesn’t address the issue of the necessarily aristocratic character of elections. Only a few ever run and fewer still ever win, and obvious distinctions can’t help but emerge between first- and second-class politicians. Universal suffrage can’t produce, in a representative democracy, the universal sharing of offices. It’s hard to deny that the perfection of political democracy would require either a return to the participatory polis of the Greeks or the Puritans, as Tocqueville reminded us, or a withering away of all the distinctions present in the very existence of the state, as Marx predicted.

But Whitman follows the lead of the dominant American founders by pointing in the direction of a universal empire oriented around the rights all human beings share and toward the conclusion that political life in some sense is part of the activity characteristic of great personalities. Every human person, his democratic faith was, is capable of greatness, and that democratic greatness, he claims, “flourishes best under imperial republican forms.”

Let me share just one paragraph of my presentation at the APSA with you. More than that would undermine your incentive to get up early on Sunday.

It often seems as if America’s Lockean foundation offered our country a kind of stability that was undermined by the Darwinian theory about the inevitability and, implicitly, about the goodness of evolution or a process of constant, natural change that encompasses all that exists. Surely the Lockean idea of natural rights connected our principles with the ideas of the eternity of nature and the eternity of God of the premodern Western philosophical tradition. But from another view, Darwin and Locke both view nature as indifferent to the existence of particular human beings or free persons. And Lockeanism is more unstable than Darwinism in its claim that human beings are free enough to transform natural reality into something better, and that the process of change is constant, endless, and moves away from the impersonal stability of the laws of nature in an increasingly personal or individualistic direction. My purpose here is to show that it’s the instability of Lockeanism that opened Americans to many of the implications of Darwinian evolution. It turns out that a true conservative or true defender of human love, liberty, and greatness would see something true in the Darwinian criticism of Locke, just as he or she would see something true in the Lockean criticism of Darwin.

So I’ve been criticized for not saying enough bad things about President Obama or commenting on this election season.

Well, my analysis of the generic D vs. R poll and the particular races suggests that it’s extremely likely that the Republicans will take over the House. Two points of hesitation: The president’s popularity rating is not THAT low. And big swings in the House are usually somewhat unexpected the summer before (2006, 1994). Something this obvious, in other words, can’t possibly happen. Still, the biggest factor may well be the enthusiasm gap, which favors the Republicans big-time right now.

The Republicans will probably come up short in the Senate, but it’s conceivable they will take over there too by sweeping all the close races (which usually happens in a swing year).

We have to add to the enthusiasm gap, of course, the perception that the president would actually prefer a Republican Congress at this point. The Democratic Left threatens his attempt to give us good government far more than the Republicans Right now. His goal is to consolidate his considerable accomplishments and not to overreach by producing new and more unpopular and quite questionable ones (such as cap-and-trade). The Republicans won’t have the votes to override his veto of any effort to modify substantially the health care bill. And it’s actually easier to get reelected (remember Clinton) by being able to share whatever blame there is to share with the other party.

Right now, any competent social scientist would predict that the president will be reelected. The enthusiasm gap will disappear in 2012, with black voters energized, liberals scared straight by the prospect of all-Republican government, and the considerable abilities of the campaigner-in-chief unleashed on the country. And of course there’s the fact that the electorate will be less white in 2012 than it was in 2008 (and the Republicans aren’t in the process of addressing their Hispanic “issues”).

But here’s what can’t be predicted: economic collapse or significant decline, foreign policy crisis (especially one incompetently handled–for example, the American reaction/contribution to the Israeli attempt to take out the Iranian nuclear capability), and the Republicans coming up with a candidate more charming and articulate than Obama. That third possibility is the one for which we should wish and the one, in principle, most in Republican control.

More coming on the challenges/opportunities of divided government.

So you’ve been wondering whether and when you’ll get to hear me at the political science convention in DC over the Labor Day Weekend.

The great news is that I’m part of three excellent shows. The bad is that two of them are that the worst conceivable times–8 a.m. Thursday and 8 a.m. Sunday. These times are supposed to be determined by lot, but I can’t help but smell a plot.

Anyway, at 8 on Thursday morning I will be on a panel on the relevance of Tocqueville today–featuring Ken Masugi, Jeremy Jennings, Cheryl B. Welch, Aristide Tessitore, and Eduardo Nolla (prime-time players all). My tentative thought is to push the unfashionable position that the “soft despotism” thing is not a Tocquevillian fear that is coming true. Let me know your thoughts on this, and more generally about what’s most relevant about Tocqueville these days.

At 2 p.m. Friday, I will be talking about Walt Whitman on a panel that will include some of the most able young scholars on politics and literature (a category, of course, which includes me)–Brian Smith, Lorraine Krall, Matt Sitman, and David Kennedy Thompson.

At 8 Sunday morning, I will speak on Locke and Darwin on an all-star postmodern conservative panel–including Ceaser, Hancock, and Mahoney.

I will get around to saying a bit more about each of the presentations.

The really nice website (thanks to Marc Guerra and his Ave Maria crew) is up. The schedule for the first conference is still somewhat tentative. But we’re having seven great shows over a two-day period. Please email me for further details.