"It can be dizzying, for an outsider, to see the Democratic Party and its allied institutions walk in lockstep — promoting a fiction that Biden 'passed the torch' voluntarily..."

"... suspending scrutiny of Harris’s policy positions, reveling in emotions and 'vibes.' But Tocqueville emphasized how democracy is not always amenable to a diversity of opinions: Instead, the majority’s pressure 'acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.'..."

Writes Jason Willick, quoting Tocqueville, in "How Alexis de Tocqueville explains Democratic Party conformity/Why Democrats could so easily pivot from defending Biden’s abilities to celebrating Harris’s takeover" (WaPo).

That last post finally pushed me over the line to create a tag I've been thinking about for a while...

... "the attack on individualism."

The pressure was building after yesterday's post about Seattle's effort to teach its employees about their own "Internalized Racial Superiority," which is "defined by" — among other things — "individualism."

What pushed me over the line into new tag creation this morning was a criticism of women who fall into the "trap" of talking about their individual struggle with motherhood.

I went back into the archive and added the tag to a few old things:

June 19, 2020 — This is a quote from a review of the book "White Fragility": "'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'"

November 29, 2015 — I quoted the Tom Wolfe essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening":

"Jon Dovey writes about how reality-TV programming affects the way we understand the very concepts of truth and authenticity."

"With the rise and dominance of reality television over the last twenty-five years comes the concomitant belief that humanity is knowable via the investigative camera, the first-person essay, and the webcam confessional. Dovey writes, 'Statements about the world no longer have any purchase unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalizing, general and unified.' Indeed, MTV traffics in the self—it rolls out a seemingly endless list of personal stories, unique identities, which are, nonetheless, ultimately generic and universalized."

From Amanda Ann Klein's "Thirty Seasons of 'The Real World'" in The New Yorker, which doesn't identify Dovey or link to his writing. I'll guess that he's this professor of screen media. I couldn't Google to more context for that quote.

I was interested in those ideas because they meshed with something I just read, the old Tom Wolfe essay,  "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" (linked yesterday in this post). That was written in 1976, which was 16 years before "The Real World" even got started (in 1992, the year of the first Clinton presidential campaign). That Wolfe essay is about the vitality of American individualism and ends quite profoundly:

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!

Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes... Me... Me... Me... Me....

ADDED: Isn't it funny for The New Yorker to be brooding about the effects of reality TV on the American mind and not to mention the most dominant reality TV character of our time: Donald Trump?

"American singer Bob Dylan has been decorated by France's Légion d'honneur..."

"... a spokesman for the historic French order said Monday, a move that raised hackles among some of the French elite."

The Légion honors foreign luminaries by granting them honorary titles within the order. They aren't considered full members of the order, which includes the likes of 19th-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville....

The Légion was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte as a civil and military order that was open to members of society outside European nobility....

***

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well...

"What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all..."

"... everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?"

A Kafka quote begins Roger Kimball's op-ed "This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit/Sandy wrecked our house, but bureaucrats are keeping it broken."

Kimball also quotes Hayek:

[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.

And Tocqueville:

"[A] network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules"... reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Books:

Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"
Roger Kimball, "The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia"

Why "You Didn’t Build That" won't go away: Obama "went after bourgeois dignity."

Virginia Postrel explains:

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations....

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient.... McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.”...

Read the whole Postrel piece, and perhaps the book as well. (I just put it in my Kindle.)

A question for the day: What is each candidate inviting us to sneer at?

The Rush Limbaugh show is on in a few minutes. I'm live-blogging it.

11:06 CT: "I knew it was getting bad..." He got a busy signal trying to call himself to cancel his own advertising for his Two If By Tea product. He begins with a joke. Then gets serious. He's going to explain what the apology really means. And people haven't understood it. His error was "becoming like" his critics by using "those 2 words." He tries to "maintain a very high level of integrity," and those 2 words were "uncalled for... and I, again, sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke." He never thought she was "either of those 2 words." He never uses those words, he asserts, and by using those words "I descended to their level." If you descend to the level of your opponent, he says, "They win." "There was no ulterior motive... no speaking in code... That's why I apologized."

11:10: At this point, Limbaugh details the the time line of the controversy, beginning with Issa's hearing. "Democrats tried to play a game" with that hearing. The hearing was originally not about contraception, but because Obama has a problem with women voters, Democrats decided to make the hearing about contraception and therefore to replace their male witness with the female Sandra Fluke (in violation of the committee's rules), Limbaugh said. This led to the spectacle of Fluke's exclusion, and then the Democrats' subcommittee staged testimony with Fluke, which, Rush asserts, showed her not to be the kind of expert who belonged on Issa's panel. Fluke "gave vague examples based on unnamed friends."

11:18: Georgetown is a Catholic University, Limbaugh says. Fluke didn't need to choose to attend that institution. "Why are you really there? Actually, they know what they're doing. They intentionally" choose institutions like this in order to work within them, trying to change them, he says. And Obama is trying to force these institutions to pay for birth control, over their moral objections. And the Democrats used Fluke to advance their agenda, he says. He wishes he'd said that last week. He focused on the idea of her having frequent sex because he's trying to be entertaining and it was relatively easy to do. That was the wrong focus. "I acted too much like the leftists who despise me.... It's way beneath me. It was wrong. I apologize — because I succumbed."

11:27: "The left... the media... giddy that some advertisers are leaving the program." But these advertisers have "done very well" through using his show to reach his audience. "They've decided they don't want you.... This show is about you, not the advertisers." He knows he's successful because of the listeners.

11:33: Intro music to this next segment is "Higher Ground." The previous segment began with "She Bop." Rush says he rejects millions of dollars in advertising because he puts the audience above the advertisers. He rejected GM, he says.

11:35: "The advertisers who don't want you — fine, we'll replace them." He criticizes those "on the left" who pressured the advertisers. That's not something he and his people do.

11:37: "I'm not waiting for apologizing from people on the left" who say "despicable" things. He mentions Bill Maher and Sarah Palin. "Don't expect apologies." He's portraying himself as on a higher level — "Higher Ground" — than his critics. He apologizes (for sinking to their level), and they don't apologize (it's their level). And they don't respect you, the people who make up his audience, who mean so much to him.

11:38: He quotes Tocqueville: "It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants." That sets up a more general attack on Obama and the Democrats.

11:52: I won't live-blog all 3 hours of the show, but I'll listen to the rest on podcast later. To sum up:

1. Rush emphasized his high values and his apology for falling from them.

2. He characterized the left as consistently behaving at the level that he unfortunately descended to and as never apologizing for that behavior.

3. He wishes he'd emphasized what really matters, which is how the Democrats played Issa's committee to try to help Obama with his problem appealing to women voters. [ADDED: I note that he helped the Dems win at this game.]

4. He loves his listeners and does the show for them, not the advertisers, of whom he has plenty champing at the bit to get onto the program.

"There's no reason for it to exist in English..."

... this "sort of book," by a Frenchman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who did some traveling in America and then "worked up his notes," to be witheringly reviewed by Garrison Keillor in the NYT:

In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

The book is called "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville." (You can read the first chapter here.)

Keillor:

Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions....

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . .

No matter how many words beginning with D in a sentence there may be...

"no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming.

Ha. This reminds me of a book in my half-read books collection: "America," by Jean Baudrillard. I got some ways into it -- I was seriously trying to read it, you know, doing that thing readers do where we submit to merging our mind with the mind of another human being -- and I just had to shake myself out of it and say nothing here rings true.

Hmmm.... "America" has a blurb from a NYT book review on the back. "Since de Tocqueville...."

IN THE COMMENTS: An interesting process of melllowing on Lévy!

A "vast and sterile desert" growing "astonishingly idiotic" men.

Think we have a problem with the French? They've been hating us for a long time. But what about Tocqueville? They thought he was presenting a "sugar-coated America."

Meanwhile, President Bush is trying to make the French like us by quoting the old sugar-coater.

Niching down.

Here's a piece in the new Atlantic that approves of the media decentralization represented by blogs. The author William Powers compares this "niching down" to the media in the 19th century:

The nineteenth century was a time of intense national growth and fervent argument about what direction the country should take. Numerous political parties appeared (Democratic, Whig, Republican, Free Soil, Know-Nothing), and the views and programs they advocated all found expression in sympathetic papers. In fact, the parties themselves financially supported newspapers, as did the White House for a time. ... [B]y the middle of the nineteenth century 80 percent of American newspapers were avowedly partisan.

This partisanship was not typically expressed in high-minded appeals to readers' better instincts. As Tocqueville wrote, "The characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of his readers; he abandons principles to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life and disclose all their weaknesses and vices." When Martin Chuzzlewit, the central character of the Dickens novel by the same name, arrives in the New York City of the early 1840s, he is greeted by newsboys hawking papers with names like the New York Stabber and the New York Keyhole Reporter. "Here's the New York Sewer!," one newsie shouts. "Here's the Sewer's exposure of the Wall Street Gang, and the Sewer's exposure of the Washington Gang, and the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old."

Funny how much Dickens's joke names for newspapers sound like things people would actually call their blogs. Anyway, Powers's point is that it's for the good:

[E]ven though the media of this period were profuse, partisan, and scandalously downmarket, they were at the same time a powerful amalgamator that encouraged participatory democracy and forged a sense of national identity.