I don’t think (Nietzsche’s) Zarathustra provides truth, only I think this image may provide an entryway into of the mindset of many of “our” best artists and thinkers. This is a banal point on my part.

By the eighties, as the vanguard of the ’60s cultural revolution saw themselves (and were so presented in the pages of the NY Times and Time magazine) as the “elder statesmen” (in their 40s!) of the movement, new modes needed to be discovered in order to keep the overcoming of all that was inherited (including anything that was good). What was outside and marginalized was declared to be the new good.

Zarathustra on his mountaintop thought a similar thing. It took time for his rhetoric to take hold–he needed the assistance of the freaks–hurdy gurdy men and dwarves, i.e., alleged outcasts. It just takes awhile from the ’60s for that truth to come down from the mountain in the ’80s. But this truth only took hold of college educated “snobs” who rejected say Bon Jovi (truly deserving of most of the invective made in his way)–but also even of Bruce Springsteen.

So like you, I think that there are good Tocquevillian reasons for thinking none of this “modernity”–whichever stage it finds itself in–is inevitable. And I too certainly pray for it not to be the case whether in Europe or the USA.

Voegelin experienced the horrors of doctrine and a resultant and derailed ideology in Germany, first hand. He spent his life as a ‘tireless’ critic of the deforming properties of dogma and doctrine and was more profoundly anti-ideological than any other philosopher, except, perhaps, Edith Stein.

The editor of The Ecumenic Age (recommended) tells his readers that Voegelin interpreted philosophy as a “…personal encounter with reality that is predicated upon a radical openness to experience.”

In an effort to rearticulate (resymbolize?) society you’ve discarded (are inclinded to move away from?) the primary social element- Christianity, and specifically the gospels-which renders reality and its symbols, which are now assumed to be immanent, distorted.

What’s missing in this excellent, contemporary, political analysis is, perhaps, an explanation/examples of the revelatory process in American history. Voegelin tells us that “..the gospel itself is an event in the drama of revelation.”

I see now that I may need to speak of two distinct forms of full modernity ; first, the largely unopposed form that arrives in Europe, where Christianity rapidly crumbles away, and the resisted from that arrives here, so that we have to speak of culture wars. Culture wars are by no means exhausted here, whatever people might say about their exhaustion with them.

And yet, revival may yet be coming to Europe. Christians like myself must pray for this, and any pomocon can note that there are Tocquevillian grounds for even expecting it.

This seems to be a quick glozing over of the problems that make connections between the “way of life” in America as “not at all as grounded in the Constitution” (“our” constitution). The “as” perhaps allows for a qualification on this statement, but it is not further elaborated on.

Do not the new discoveries of politics “unknown to the ancients” open a problem in that “representation” allows for an analysis which says that the “way of life” (of government or politics) is distinctive from the (historically autonomous) “culture”–the basic full on modern distinction of “state” and “society”?

So Plato’s “cycle” of regimes might be inapt. Perhaps the ever more freedom focus is simply a variation on Zarathustra descending from his cave and returning after realizing his solitary wisdom hasn’t met ripeness amongst the represented? But he descends again…and again. And who knows how many times? Hyperborean knowledge takes time to properly thaw.

And of course, we all know the teaching–”God is dead.”

This is why Carl is on sounder ground when he spoke of Aristotle’s “polity” and the kind of political science Aristotle represents as opposed to Plato.

But then again, much of what Carl says about American life–as Socratic descriptions of democracy as represented in Plato’s Republic–from the 1920s (the first manifestation of the “culture wars”?) to the 1960s (the beginning of the exhaustion of “culture wars”?) actually rings true for today.

Speaking of the whininess (and exhaustion) of Lou Reed, try this one from the 1980s–

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTlsSXNT2bg

By the ’80s there are no more Jesus freaks, just multiculturalism and a generic rage against what he considers to be all that is bad in America.

Reagan’s use was a way of signally that this was indeed true in so far as he opened up the Republican party to non-WASPs’. Who else were the “Reagan Democrats”?

So if you ask me, it was this act during the Reagan administration that was the final blurring of lines between the oncoming “Democratic Man” and the last vestiges of “Aristocratic Man.”

Reagan’s causative contribution to this decline came through his massive top-marginal and corporate tax reductions (and deregulation?). This substantially reduced the barrier between small-business and big-business, allowing upstarts (like Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns) to grow the way they did during his boom years.

And I don’t understand why Reagan should be at all blamed for the demise of WASP society. Nor do I lament its demise all that much…