A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.
via www.nybooks.com
Within the scope of Mark Lilla's review of five recent books concerned with US politics, he offers an examination of the Tea Party movement. Lilla touches on an array of trends in America, from home-schooling to $4,000,000,000 herbal remedies and supplements industry. It is an interesting read (as is nearly every article printed in The New York Review of Books).
Lilla continues with descriptions of the past 50 years' two revolutions.
We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing—though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have—and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.
Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still....
Lilla describes this angry group as being similar to Jacobins (pro-French Revolution radicals of the late 1700s and early 1800s), but antipolitical ones.
The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.
Lilla thinks that the Tea Party is part of a larger phenomenon that has not yet run its full course.
Survey after survey confirms that trust in government is dissolving in all advanced democratic societies,...and no one party or scandal is to blame. Representative democracy...first give[s] citizens voice as individuals, and then echo[es] their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing.
Hold onto your tea cozies. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
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