That’s two separate issues…
I agree with Pete that encouraging Ryan to enter the race is to fall short of endorsing him. It’s even a kind of desperation move based on pessimistic premises. Despite his lack of managerial experience and all that, Kate in the thread below is right to say Ryan talks like a manager, and he acts like a guy who could lead. Despite the TEA PARTY, his particular issue–telling the truth about our entitlement situation and really explaining how we have to act accordingly–is not one that’s likely to cut in the Republican direction. But, if nothing else, Ryan will raise the other Republicans above the vague blather of cutting big government, cutting taxes, and growing jobs etc. And, we can add, elections, particularly for president, do have a strong personal dimension. Maybe Ryan (as did Obama) can convince America he’s someone they can trust and look up to. The man himself might be the change people can believe in. Let (the cruel) vetting process begin.
To Carl and others in the thread about aristocracy and democracy: Tocqueville’s claim is that the ruling class sort of imposes its morality–largely just by being “role models” (or ladies and gentleman) on society as a whole. And so the South has a always fading “perspective” that more about warriors, heroes, the connection between virtue and deserved success (as well as the connection between virtue and living well with undeserved defeat), a kind of anti-commerical bias, a preference for nontechnical and dignified modes of speech, a love of leisure and adventure (and so a corresponding disdain for real work), guns, agriculture that’s neither subsistence nor industrial, poetry and literature that are romantic and deeply nostalgic, tradition, Stoic (as opposed to techno-Lockean) philosophy, hunting, true (or nonprogressive, noninstrumental) religion, and the “aristocratic” (meaning great man) theory of history. All these qualities Tocqueville describes as aristocratic, in fact, and they are defended to some great extent by TRUE GRIT the novel and even more by the eloquent Confederate (and I don’t mean racist at all) defender of the book by Portis over the Coens’ movie.
That these qualities have been democratized and were never purely aristocratic in America is obvious. Sir and ma’m are universalized in the South now, including, of course, blacks. But at one point, we have to tell the truth, the South was, in part, an aristocracy that included all white people. And that recognition, of course, is why “the rednecks” so vehemently opposed the abolition of segregation. The more economically privileged whites were far less about that hate and adjusted quickly to integregration, because they thought of themselves as much more than merely white men.
So I can’t flesh all this out and am trying to provoke discussion through assertion.
I will add, to Bob Cheeks, the pro-Voegelian South was, in some large measure, the literary construction of writers moved, in some large measure, by the memories (necessarily selective) of dispossessed aristocrats. I don’t deny (as I suggested above) that they had real material to work with.
August 20th, 2011 | 3:18 pm
I’m with you re: Mr. Ryan.
A key to ‘fleshing’ out the democratic-aristocratic inclinations of the South may lie in their (white Southerners of means/land owners/yeomen) self understanding as members of the so-called ‘country’ party which dates back before the revolutionary period. From Clyde Wilson’s essay, “Citizen or Subject,” we have, “..the “country party” which sought to defend and preserve the community.” The country party, was an eloquent defender of (American) republicanism and an opponent of the “court party” that sought to centralize political power.
Now, this is a political phenomenon, and I have no desire to follow the thread forward into the Big War but rather to show that the pre-bellum, agrarian South tends to be focused on republicanism (out of necessity), while the North is moving toward centralization of political power (Leviathon) to institute any number of programs that may actually weaken the idea of liberty, at least as that term is understood by the founding generation.
Any analysis of the idea of the Southern democratic-aristocrat requires a thorough understanding of the social forces acting on these gentlemen. The Southern man was the product of a culture that sought to establish a coterie of men who reflected the virtues of the Platonic-Aristotelian mature man (spoudaioi) who intuitively understands the obligation to defend the honor, not only of his family, but of his community as well, against the pressures of social decay, or the invasion of an enemy.
In fact, there are those who might argue the spiritual, social, and technological experiences of the North following the founding period, indicate a society entering a state of ‘kinesis’ (a feverish movement of society) that would, within just a few decades, precipitate the Big War.
I believe the South’s democratic-aristocrat (“the order of a polis is courage”) were, very much, aware of the social disorder occurring north of the Ohio River. The South did not share in this ‘morbus animi’ (disease of the mind) because of it’s agrarian, religious, and political inclinations and to its credit it rejected (generally speaking) it’s more egregious elements.
August 20th, 2011 | 4:58 pm
Well, I can agree with all of this. Yes, Sir. And I appreciate it. I love Virginia all the more because of all of this.
But there was a very hard current running through the South as well, perhaps best seen though Herbert Storing’s essay which hints at how Lockean theory leaves a few cracks open for racialist slavery to run in, and how the deep theory surely says (my paraphrase) “well, men will grab what advantages they can, especially against those outside the contract”. You see what Taney did on that score, reading blacks out of the American People, a bad reading nonetheless true to what a lot of white Americans North and South then (and sometimes still) believe, and upon sound enough Lockean reasoning. And of course there is Jefferson’s own shameful example of later development away from his (Lincolnian) denunciation of slavery in the name of natural rights liberty into his (anti-Washington) stance in favor of shoring up the institution, (or at the least) in favor of making it harder to manumit slaves than it was when George did it. And I seem to recall a lot of hard calculating types revealed in Faulkner, etc.
I love the Winthropian echo heard in Sam Adams’ call for a “Christian Sparta,” even if I’m not a Sam fan. I love what Tocqueville and Bryce found at work in the New England townships, which Jefferson in one of his better moments sought to bring Southwards. So no way am I going to cede all of the “alternative” or “polis/aristocracy” elements of the American tradition to Southerners. Especially to those whining Southerners who sound like bitter Russians, ever blaming some monolith called the West or Liberalism for everything that went wrong, and especially since even if all of the North had fallen into the sea circa 1840, or all of the West had fallen into the sea prior to Peter the Great, the South and Russia would still have had to eventually deal with all the modern craziness.
And Robert, to pick up where we left off below, maybe an Abigail Adams (if not a New England woman of the 1870s) would have gone off after justice like Mattie did, but maybe she would have been Christian enough to hesitate more than Mattie does, who lands in a pit.
August 21st, 2011 | 9:46 am
Bob, You just gotta admit the relationship between the aristocratic consciousness (including even its good points) and race-based slavery (which generated really feverish disorders of the mind–such as scientific racism).
August 21st, 2011 | 10:41 am
And Carl, I’m all about the Stoic southerners and the Puritans as the two American counter-cultures that correct the excesses of each other. And I like the truthful concessions on the ambivalence on Lockeanism, which cry out for Stoic and Christian correction. Yes sir, I will get to all this. Bob, you need to get a bit more Puritanical. And you West Coast Straussians need to see what’s true and good in both the Puritans and the South.
August 21st, 2011 | 3:29 pm
I think I would endorse Ryan over the current crew of Republican aspirants, though I’m thinking through the question of his electability vs. Romney’s. To the first glance I think Romney is more electable. Romney never proposed (to my knowledge) a change to federal tax policy that would probably have unwound the employer-based insurance syste. Maybe that is a good idea, but I’m not sure that the public is ready for it. Then again Romney signed Obamacare in one state. I’m not sold on Romney electability or even nominability. While obviously smart, he has never struck me as fast on his feet (corporations are people – true in several senses but…) and he is a uniter not a divider in that no one can have much clue if he believes what he is saying or if he believes much of anything (within the bounds of our current political disputes – no doubt he is against Nazism, Maoism, etc.)
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