On Democratic Devolution
Partisans.– A comprehensive explanation for today’s hyper-partisan politics (aka tribalism) would merely be an elucidation of this aphorism from Nietzsche, published in 1878:
Not suited to be a party man. — He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.1Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (R. J. Hollingdale translation), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, ยง579, p. 188.
From which we may infer that an age in which there is little genuine thought, and a lot of active disdain for thought, would be an age of particularly pernicious party men, which is to say of men utterly incapable of thinking their way through irrational allegiances, which is to say of sheep not only willing, but all too eager, to bleat with ecstatic love or hatred right on cue, on the prompting of any random shepherd who happens to catch their attention for the moment.
And this condition — men unable to think for themselves, but for that very reason immensely capable of periodic outbursts of intensity on behalf of “ideas” or individuals they lack the independence of soul to understand or judge for themselves — is the embodiment of the predicament Tocqueville identified as the single greatest inherent danger of modern liberal democracy, namely that its very moral success and material fruitfulness should produce a generation of citizens so cocooned in their private comfort and pleasure that they will happily cede all their real liberty and adulthood to quasi-benevolent “guardians” who promise to take care of them like children, so long as their servitude may be perceived as the product of electoral self-determination.
It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.
I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them [i.e., voting]. The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men….
It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.
A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a shortlived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.2Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America (Francis Bowen translation), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Everyman’s Library Edition, 1994, Vol. II, 320-1.
Safety in numbers.– Fear of the other leads frightened men to cling to whatever is perceived as, or promises to be, both akin to themselves and strong enough to protect them, and to cling to it ever more tightly in proportion to their fear. Hence it is in the interests of one who craves faithfully blind adherents to encourage fear of the other, and to encourage it ever more vociferously in proportion to his awareness that blind faith is the only kind he ever could hope to inspire. And if that other itself is undergoing a similar devolution into clinging fearfully to anything that claims to promise protection or revenge against its other, then you will end up with competing factions of frightened fools, each racing collectively off an opposite cliff in the name of self-preservation.
Hence we see America today (mirrored by much of the rest of the democratic world), with each of her two mainstream parties having shepherded its voting base into an abyss in a foolish lurch after an alleged salvation that has turned out, predictably, to be its nemesis. The old defenders of private property rights and “traditional morality” now wholeheartedly embrace corporate fascism, nihilistic idolatry, and the normalization of at least five of the seven deadly sins. Meanwhile, the old proponents of compassion and free-thinking now wholeheartedly embrace the material thuggery of Marxist authoritarianism and the strictest possible policing of all thought and speech, having themselves raised at least five of the deadly sins to the status of an ideology.
