If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
The tragedy behind Kissinger’s realpolitik (ROBERT D. KAPLAN, 11/30/23, UnHerd)
Kissinger’s beliefs, which emerge through his writing, are certainly not for the faint-hearted. They are emotionally unsatisfying, yet analytically timeless. They include: […]
[O]order is more important than freedom, since without order there is no freedom for anybody.
The Realist elevation of “order” above freedom is little more than collaboration with evil.
Greatness Without Cruelty: Young Nietzscheans should look to Tocqueville as a more politically responsible source for a new politics. (Daniel J. Mahoney, 11/29/23, Religion & Liberty)
[N]ietzsche threw the baby out with the bathwater. He indiscriminately blamed Platonic philosophy and Christianity for the excesses of democracy and the “degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal…this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims” (BGE, #203). In doing so, he confused love of neighbor with resentment of greatness, and the search for timeless truths with the abdication of the willing and striving that defines humanity at its noblest. His defense of cruelty, of rank as an end itself, and of the “blond beast,” may not be his final word as a philosopher. But that kind of rhetoric was both intoxicating and grotesquely irresponsible.
Leo Strauss memorably argued in his 1957 essay “What is Political Philosophy?” that Nietzsche “used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism and democracy as well.” In doing so, “he left them with no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics,” a kind of self-satisfied aesthetic nihilism, “and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime, which as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy again look again like the golden age.” Strauss added with true profundity that Nietzsche’s excessive valorization of the human will, of “will to power,” of “the triumph of the will,” would lead his descendants, from Heidegger to the existentialists to the even more vulgar postmodernists, to renounce “the very notion of eternity,” of the true and unchanging, of the enduring things. Man would sacrifice his nature, and the very order of things, to give free reign to his will.
Young enthusiasts on the Right take note: There is another way. As Harvey Mansfield once remarked, everything that is true and solid in Nietzsche can be found in an infinitely more responsible way in the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. The great French thinker and statesman, too, despised socialism and the despotism of the soft which is the moral core of “soft” or “tutelary” despotism. But he did not reject Christianity, democracy, or equality rightly understood. He wrote nobly in the first volume of Democracy in America that “there is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that incites men to want all to be strong and esteemed.” At the same time, he derided “a depraved taste for equality in the human heart that brings the weak to want to draw the strong to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.” As Pierre Manent argues in An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Tocqueville criticizes the pathological softness that can accompany and deform democracy without ever praising “‘harshness’ or even ‘cruelty.’” Against the humanitarian Left and the atheistic Right, the party of pity and the party of cruelty, he defends a noble and elevated conception of “political freedom” that “makes men come out of themselves to live in a common world, providing the wisdom for judging their virtues and their vices; only political freedom allows them to see themselves as both as equals and as distinct.”
Tocqueville called this path “liberty under God and the law.”
People, stop being crybabies: Life is better now than ever (Quin Hillyer, November 27, 2023, Washington Examiner)
Far too many people have become spoiled, ungrateful, whiny wretches.That’s the proper conclusion from a Wall Street Journal poll showing that barely more than a third of people believe “the American dream — that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead — still holds true.” Compared to the 36% who say it still holds true, 45% said it once was true but not anymore, and 18% said it never held true.
Only the 36% have it right. The rest are, to put it bluntly, pathetic defeatists. Likewise for the 50% who say life for ordinary Americans is worse than it was 50 years ago, against only 30% who say it is better.
We have a powerful urge to be the hero of our own stories, which we can’t be if we acknowledge how affluent we are and how easy modern life is
The End of History and The Last Man and Liberalism and Its Discontents (Pierre Lemieux, Fall 2022, Regulation)
[F]ukuyama realized that liberal democracy could meet obstacles on the path to the end of history. One danger would be a drift into extreme equality at the cost of freedom. The more equal society becomes, the more remaining small inequalities seem to stand out. As a result, society could splinter into closed identity groups. Trying to create an equal society could also result in building a new class of privileged rulers, as happened under communism. The equalizers tend to not be the equals of the equalized.
Fukuyama noted that the perils of liberal democracy are accentuated by a current philosophical crisis over the “nature of man.” For many environmentalists, man is just another organism, due no special respect. This view has not changed over the past three decades.
Another peril is the return of thymos from those affected by megalothymia, who want to be more recognized than others—as opposed to isothymia, the equal recognition of all in a democracy.
We know this as Identity politics.
Shock therapy, please: A frustrated Argentina has chosen radical economic reform (David Smith, 11/22/23, The Critic)
In the eyes of the voters here, the folks in power had for so long buried decency in a mafia-style political operation, designed to keep themselves in power forever — robbing one of the richest countries on the planet for themselves. They have been making almost half the population certifiably poor and dependent on government handouts, despite a rhetoric of inclusion and social justice that had the old Left in Europe celebrating the ruling Peronist party.
In this scenario, libertarian maverick Milei, an economics professor barely known three years ago, stormed the country with a chainsaw, promising to slash the state and get rid of the entrenched caste of politicians. Anarcho-capitalist, he calls himself. He’s never knowingly undersold.
Milei’s voters were overwhelmingly young, across the entire country, showing how much this means to them. The next generation of Argentines saw this election as do or die — or do or leave — and voted in overwhelming numbers for the former goalkeeper with a boyhood aspiration to be Argentina’s Mick Jagger. To them, the economics professor offered hope: a future that might keep them in a country they love. His message was direct and TikTok savvy: completely blunt on the need for radical change, with private property and capitalism as the guarantees of freedom.
It worked. On the 40th anniversary of its return to democracy, Argentines stood up to be counted and positively chose shock therapy. To protect the integrity of their polling stations, tens of thousands of volunteers watched over every vote cast. Amazingly, all sides ended up acknowledging that the democratic process on voting day was exemplary; the result was accepted as the will of the majority. Again, a positive.
The Second Way failed everywhere.