On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
George Packer has a thought-provoking comparison at The New Yorker:
[Peter] Thiel and Kachel [a homeless fan of Rachel Maddow] embody what could be called the politics of dissolution. In different, almost antithetical ways, they represent a political experience that would have made little sense fifty or sixty years ago. Each in his own way is alienated from the established order. Neither has any faith in traditional American institutions and élites. Thiel isn’t part of the corporate establishment, and he’s moved away from the Republican party. Kachel has no connections to organized labor; his main political affiliation is his devotion to the Rachel Maddow show. Neither of them puts much store in elections, or conventional politics generally. (For example, the subject of the 2012 Presidential race rarely came up in conversation with either of the two.) Both of them have a fundamental sense that things in America are not working. Both of them entertain fantasies of an alternative polity where things might work better: for Thiel, a floating city-state on the high seas where the long arm of national and international government can’t reach (he’s the largest supporter of the libertarian Seasteading Institute); for Kachel, a park in lower Manhattan where, for two months, a self-organizing community took root.
Since Tocqueville, conservative educators of liberalism (as Harvey Mansfield has called them) have cautioned that the particular dystopia toward which a free people are prone in a democratic age is (cue our own Paul Rahe) soft despotism. Government, we are warned, will become ever more distant yet ever more intimately involved in the details of everyday life, helping to deprive political life of human greatness and (as Allan Bloom put it) flatten out the soul. With only a slight shift of analytical perspective, we find ourselves on the road to serfdom.
Packer's careful musings suggest strongly what thinkers like Peter Lawler have proposed: that, paradoxically, we live in a regime where people are, in some important ways, more on their own than ever. Neither Thiel nor Kachel much resemble serfs. They're unique individuals, of course, but they shed light on who we find on the side of what often looks like the road to soft-despotic serfdom. What's more, they suggest how it is that others like them will wind up there.
Packer doesn't give the real distinction between Thiel and Kachel its due (Thiel wants to turn our metaphorical souls away from politics; Kachel wants us to attend to questions of justice even more deeply). But Packer does make what strikes me as the essential point --
Something about the turbulence of this age, the deep sense of dissatisfaction with things as they are, prompts people to discard the stale verities and invent new ones. Which, after all, is a very old way to respond to distress in this country. Whatever you think of their ideas and causes, both Thiel and Kachel represent something of the restlessness, the openness to the future, that has gotten America through other troubled times.
-- a suitably conservative lesson for our despairing acolytes of progress.
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Aug '10
Re: On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
But is that so paradoxical? It is always in the despot's interest (even when the despot is soft) to shrivel the ties that bind individuals to each other, since allegiance to anything -- anything -- other than the despot is a potential threat.
Aug '10
Re: On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
I'm gonna call this a win for the right in that our loosely attached and alienated person is an idiosyncratically thoughtful billionaire who created wealth through entrepreneurial VC investment and their loosely attached and alienated person is a vagrant who got to spend a few months doing jazz hands in the park.
Apr '11
Re: On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
Perhaps we suffer from the monotony of stability. For nearly 3 decades we have been prosperous and have only had to follow the laid out course in front of us to achieve success. Maybe we have grown bored. We don't seem to have a unifying challenge that drives the imagination and propels people foreword. The war on terror is more a nuisance to us than a true struggle, we don't really have a true rival to compete with, nor is there a great unknown frontier left to explore and colonize. What is it that the American people have that we look to for signs of clear progress. That is to say signs that we are achieving something of lasting value. We are not expanding into the west, we are not beating back the Soviets, we aren't landing people on the moon. We are just toying around the edges of our governmental institutions and bombing some bad people here and there without much fan fare.
Re: On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
Hence the turn to what's been called national greatness conservatism -- and, I might add, things like Barack Obama's insane call to out-innovate the rest of the world. Why isn't it enough for our vitality and 'sense of purpose' to remove our administrative barriers to kinetic economic action? Why can't we find satisfaction in a great American free-for-all? The answers might point somewhere important, but I have my doubts that they point where national-projects politicos of both parties might want them to.
Aug '10
Re: On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
James Poulos
Why isn't it enough for our vitality and 'sense of purpose' to remove our administrative barriers to kinetic economic action? Why can't we find satisfaction in a great American free-for-all?
Man, I wish I knew.
We all yearn for something transcendent, I think. If folks aren't sufficiently plugged into religious or cultural activities that fulfill this yearning, maybe they naturally turn to politics.
Apr '11
Re: On the Side of the Road to Serfdom
Interesting piece, James. Thanks for the link. It reminds me of some of what Walter Russell Mead has written about the great unwind of the Blue Social Model. It is fascinating as a conservative/libertarian and disturbing as a child of the '80's to watch those old respectable institutions take on the aspect of an over-used lady of the night.