Post by Don on Apr 9, 2017 6:03:47 GMT -5
Writing at The Hill, David D'Amato recalls some history with chilling implications for today. (Bolding mine)
Prior to Obama, I saw little widespread religious fervor attached to the presidency compared to today. Bereft of their belief in sky gods, the left incarnated one on earth. In response, the right has now incarnated one of their own... one who stands for essentially none of the ideals they claimed for the sky god they now seem to have abandoned. And the two strains of socialism seem poised once again to go to war with each other.
Those who warned that Obama was a fundamentally different sort of president now have Donald Trump to point to as another example of that set.
This religious cult of personality bodes ill for the future of the political class, and for those who serve them, IMO.
Go ahead, pick this one into little pieces. It's still only the germ of an idea, and needs both nurturing and trimming to grow.
In the early twentieth century, the various socialist schools outstripped classical liberalism as the dominant idea on the Continent, their message capturing European hearts and minds. Communists and fascists fought each other for converts and for political power. As historian Mary Vincent observes, “[T]he battle for the streets was very real. In an age of genuine mass politics, street violence became the leitmotiv of interwar Europe.” Vincent explains that the “new politics,” divided between fascism and communism, “filled public space with disciplined, uniformed bodies,” ready to advance the collective goals of party and state.
These warring authoritarians, socialists all, shared a common disdain for the Enlightenment’s liberal conception of freedom, namely the freedom of the individual to live out her life autonomously, un-coerced and pursuing goals of her own imagining.
Modernity required something more of the individual — that she be absorbed into the body of the total state, the consecrated instrument variously of the nation, or the proletarian revolution, or even history itself, depending on the socialist school.
The new conception of freedom, deeply embedded in today’s politics, reflects this submersion of the individual, the Hegelian idea that the state precedes the individual in importance.
Superficial differences notwithstanding, both the leftmost and rightmost spaces of today’s political spectrum, as popularly understood, seem to have absorbed Hegel’s idea of the organic state, the state as “the Divine Idea” and source of the individual’s “spiritual reality.”
These warring authoritarians, socialists all, shared a common disdain for the Enlightenment’s liberal conception of freedom, namely the freedom of the individual to live out her life autonomously, un-coerced and pursuing goals of her own imagining.
Modernity required something more of the individual — that she be absorbed into the body of the total state, the consecrated instrument variously of the nation, or the proletarian revolution, or even history itself, depending on the socialist school.
The new conception of freedom, deeply embedded in today’s politics, reflects this submersion of the individual, the Hegelian idea that the state precedes the individual in importance.
Superficial differences notwithstanding, both the leftmost and rightmost spaces of today’s political spectrum, as popularly understood, seem to have absorbed Hegel’s idea of the organic state, the state as “the Divine Idea” and source of the individual’s “spiritual reality.”
Those who warned that Obama was a fundamentally different sort of president now have Donald Trump to point to as another example of that set.
This religious cult of personality bodes ill for the future of the political class, and for those who serve them, IMO.
Go ahead, pick this one into little pieces. It's still only the germ of an idea, and needs both nurturing and trimming to grow.