How Alexis de Tocqueville can help us stay sane – The Washington … – Washington Post

By Sonny Bunch By Sonny Bunch February 8

I was excited to see that one of my favorite writers, James Poulos, had a book coming out and doubly so when I saw that it was about the way Alexis de Tocqueville can help us understand our crazy, tumultuous time. So excited, in fact, that I emailed him to ask if he wanted to take part in a brief Q-and-A over email to discuss The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves. (The exchange below has been edited for style and clarity.)

Part self-help, part political philosophy, Poulos who is a contributing editor at American Affairs and was a doctoral fellow at the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University seamlessly weaves together references to Britney Spears and Plato, Marilyn Manson and Nietzsche. I dont think anyone has better mixed gifs and maxims. Its the perfect book for all of us who have been addled by Twitter and are looking to reorient our perspective on life and love.

Sonny Bunch:This feels like a book that is influenced by Los Angeles its sensibilities and its preoccupations almost as much as it is by Tocqueville. What do you think hed have made of La La Land? Or, as it were,La La Land? (If you havent seen the movie, you can just ignore that last part.)

James Poulos: The Art of Being Free is a very Californian book, and not of the NorCal variety. I think thats by necessity. Theres no talking about the American soul without talking about Los Angeles. What goes on here is, with varying degrees of self-awareness, a sort of terminal or ultimate Americanness. Tocqueville would have expected that. When I read his line about reading Shakespeares Henry V for the first timein an American log cabin, I looked at my half-finished Tocqueville in Los Angeles book and thought, I can do this. I have his blessing.

Plus,talking about L.A. is a great way to talk about myself without giving too much away. Thats also by necessity. Tocqueville saw that the American imagination only really sang for ourselves, our heroic exertions in being how we are. Neither polytheism, centered on permanently warring gods whocapture the reactionary imagination, nor pantheism, with its radical disappearance into natural harmony, could hold our attention for long. Yet heres Hollywood cranking out apocalypse fantasies with one hand and anti-speciesist fairy tales with the other. La La Land rejects both. Its a fantasy for the humans, by the humans, and of the humans. Of course its a hit.

Yet its not really make-believe. La La Land isa typically deeply personal American sales pitch for the earnest heroism of the commercial imagination. At its height, that heroism cant help but become, and produce, art. (Sing makes this point in a different key.) The reward for our crazy but disciplined effort to be marketable yet authentic is a reconciliation between our cash value, which we want ASAP, and the infinite, eternal longings we know we can never satisfy in our evanescent times on Earth.

SB: I love the fact that you can discuss La La Land and Sing or, say, Britney Spears and Marilyn Manson in the same breath as Tocqueville and the idea of America. Is this merely a rhetorical strategy to help connect with the audience, or do you think theres something fundamentally, well,Americanabout the democratic nature of our popular culture?

JP: Theres a reason America dominates popular culture wherever the equality of tastes, habits, mores, and conditions spreads. We got a head start on living into that equality in a place in the sun, outside the long shadow of history, devoid of ancient hang-ups. We didnt need or seek or suffer the kind of egalitarian revolution that had to rely on abstract ideas in the absence of any experience of equality. Despite our crazy dysfunction, we know nothing of the profound, crippling impasses plaguing the social psychology of the Old World.

I just dont think theres a way to talk about Tocqueville and the idea of America in a way that many people can care about without talking about what they docare about not necessarily Zoolander or Midnite Vultures, but contemporary stuff that lays bare how we are the way we are right this very instant. I knew from the beginning The Art of Being Free could never be the most learned book about Tocqueville. But it could end up being the only R-rated book ever written about Tocqueville, and that seemed important in a way the book could only really unpack by example, by going about things as it did.

SB: It is, perhaps, telling that one of the things we love reality TV has in many very real ways heightened the craziness that you write about by helping make President Trump a fact of life. Do you think that the Great Transition and the way it sorts winners and losers almost necessarily by finances meant that a Trump-like figure was more or less inevitable? Are we in for a run of fabulously famous and obscenely wealthy folks dominating national (if not necessarily state or local) politics?

JP: The paradox of reality TV needs attention, but, paradoxically, not too much. We love it, and hate it, because of how real it is, yet isnt. The same goes for reality stars, who are and arent stars famous for being famous, meaning loved yet hated for being famous. One definition of obsession is to be trapped at a single impasse with your love and your hate. What happens to the experience of freedom when obsession colors so much of life, individually and together? When were obsessed with obsession, as I put it in the book? Todaywere in danger of defining freedom as how little you have to care about how many haters you have, but, paradoxically, that also means we jealously admire those who have attracted the most haters. Nietzsche said society might reach such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it letting those who harm it go unpunished. What are my parasites to me? it might say. May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that! This self-overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself mercy. Heres Trump wishing a Merry Christmas even to the losers and haters. But that attitude is hardly a Trump innovation. Its more a hallmark of ours than of his. The dominance of reality TV is inevitable in a culture centered around celebrating those who can put on the best performances despite because of being hagridden with parasites. Go listen to Queen by Perfume Genius, and you will understand, through experience and not abstract ideas, that to the degree money flows into decadence, decadence must eventually flow into power. The big question today is whether any super-rich people with low parasite counts are willing to put their superabundant but still precious life force into politics.

SB:Does the answer to todays big question come with the initials P.T.? Or perhaps M.Z.?What do you think Tocqueville would have made of our reliance on, reverence for, and distaste with our super-wealthy cyberspace overlords? Is there even really an equivalent in early American history to draw a comparison to?

JP: Tocqueville warned of an industrial aristocracy, but knew it could only be a fleeting climax in the great transition between aristocratic and democratic ages. But its a hallmark of our age that most of us get sucked into competitive conformity. Only a few have the talent, ambition, and timing to punch through the ceiling of collective interchangeable insignificance. And when they do, they often find there are almost no limits to how fast and how high they can advance, if only for a hot minute. Result: they pull up the ladders, acting like a species apart, and we resent them for it, no matter how much they try to buy favorability. On the flip side, Tocqueville notes, we love even the super-rich if they convince us they genuinely believe their similarity to the rest of us is even more important than their difference. Hi, Mark Zuckerberg. But technology now has a postindustrial problem. Our scramble to edge out those otherwise almost identical to us has exacerbated a deadly imbalance in our political economy toward bits and away from atoms, as Peter Thiel puts it. This is new. It urgently needs correction. And aside from the likes of Thiel and Elon Musk, I dont really see anyone with the economic, intellectual, and social heft to yank the rudder without capsizing the boat.

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