[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Thu Aug 6 05:12:18 PDT 2009


Chris Doss wrote:


> I had no idea that the term was first used by De Tocqueville. Thanks. I
> have never read him.
>
> Do you think that he may have been idealizing the stability of premodern
> society? As you're putting it here, it sounds a lot like the fantasies of
> the idyllic past you see in a lot of conservativism. (In particular, the
> ideal state being conceived of as one in which everybody knows his or her
> place and all classes work harmoniously is a mainstay of the classical
> European right; it was one of Mussolini's main points.)
>
> I mean, he was French, writing in the aftermath of the French Revo, which
> saw abolishing traditional society and overthrowing ruling classes as its
> central goal. It's not like the France of De Tocqueville's time was a
> class-conflict-free place. What's particularly American about this?

Yeah, sure, Tocqueville was a bit of a Romantic alongside his proto-Progressivism... the issue, however, is whether or not "individualism" represents a materialist abstraction useful for understanding then-still-quite-emergent America, modernity and capitalism and whether it is still useful today. Simply because premodern societies are variously romanticized and/or reified by 19th C scholars doesn't necessarily mean that the abstractions they generate are proto-Fascist. It seems to me that Tocqueville was a pretty sophisticated and nuanced guy, one simultaneously (and quite appropriately) concerned about the isolationist, xenophobic, self-ish and anti-social nature individualism *and *appreciative of the power of that tendency to liberate individuals from the oppressive nature of premodern society.

In re: your last paragraph: Are you actually suggesting that France is, or was in the 19th C, as individualistic a place as the US? Throughout my undergraduate and graduate education I was regularly shown elements of the
>150 years of deeply poltical scholarship asking the question why there is
so little class politics in the United States, esp. relative to Europe, and particularly because "objectively" class conflict is so much more transparent and so much more weakly resisted in the US? It seems like your suggesting that the hegemonic ideology of American Individualism advanced by liberals and conservatives in the US (a range of legitimate political discourse constrained by our republican, winner-take-all form of representative democracy) isn't meaningfully different than the far wider range of legitimate political identities and ideologies in Western Europe - identities and ideologies rarely rooted in appeals to Thatcher-ite anti-society individualism.

Of course, as Don Swearer - my comparative eastern religion professor as an undergrad - tried to point out in a letter to Carter in 1980, the US is actually utterly split between an almost-atheoretical and anti-intellectual populist communitarianism and a presociological and also anti-intellectual competitive individualism. To my mind, these tendencies lie at the heart of the long-term inability of either of Domhoff's liberal-labor coalition and the corporate-conservative coalition to hold together for any significant length of time.

In short, individualism doesn't explain everything but it is a powerful and necessary element in understanding the dialectics of modernity, esp. in the US (and esp. in the US relative to everywhere else.)



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