How the liberal “Treatment” is applied to everything today, from Tocqueville to movie kisses

Laura W. writes:

I have just finished Hugh Brogan’s massive, 725-page biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, published earlier this year after more than 30 years in the works as the first full-length biography in English. This is likely to be the definitive life of Tocqueville for English-speaking readers for decades to come. C’est dommage! Tocqueville feared he would encounter hostile readers. In Brogan surely his worst visions have come true.

Tocqueville sticks in the craw for liberals today more than ever. Understandably, his prediction of tyrannical majorities reduces Brogan almost to apoplexy. But Brogan dismisses many of Tocqueville’s keenest observations and presents De la Democratie en Amerique, particularly its second volume, as the wily expression of the author’s pathological loyalty to caste and as a bundle of “effusions of nineteenth century male ideology.” As Brogan sees, it, this French aristocrat was a hopeless neurotic who traveled to America with “an axe to grind.” Sure, he had a way with words, but hardly a single worthy idea.

Tocqueville is “triumphantly perverse,” guilty of “hysterical anxiety,” a slipshod researcher who tends toward the “deductive will-o’-the-wisp” and, in his second, brilliant, 1840 volume, “does not even have the merit of originality.” Tocqueville’s bittersweet prediction that individual anomie would be a necessary outcome of egalitarianism was one more sign of his “snobbish prejudice.” Americans, after all, would find togetherness in “political parties, trade unions, great business firms and proselytizing churches,” chides Brogan. Tocqueville, who lamented (though never called for resurrecting) those bygone ages when a man could “already perceive his great-grandsons,” had a tin ear for progress.

Most shockingly, Tocqueville, the famous doubter, comes off as a crusading religious extremist who “shovels” his “psychologically necessary” deism into his books. “He seems to fear that in the democratic age his own religious beliefs will be threatened. This he cannot tolerate.” Is this the man who wounded his beloved Bebe, the childhood tutor Abbe Le Sueur, with his religious apostasy and maintained the latter to his dying days? Brogan laments: “Unfortunately, as we have seen, he was never able to transcend the cultural limitations of his cradle Catholicism.”

Possibly, says Brogan, it all boils down to “guilt about his mother.” How else to explain Tocqueville’s further failure to call for women’s suffrage and foresee the likes of Hillary? Brogan devotes himself admirably to telling the details of Tocqueville’s life and background. Too bad. For ultimately he has, in a triumphantly perverse way, knocked one more Western white guy off the shelf of literary glory.

LA replies:

This is most interesting. Sooner or later, everyone is subjected to the “Liberal Treatment,” found out as a bigot uptight with equality and diversity. Now even the greatest intellectual champion of American equality is found to be too right wing, because, after all, he was not totally on board with every aspect of equality but had thoughtful reservations about it. Only 100 percent pure liberalism passes muster today. So he gets the “Treatment.”

Laura replies:

By the way, I’ve discovered a new convention in the art of biography. When discussing a famous person’s past, you must speculate on whether or not he was “in love with” his childhood chums. So what if there is not the slightest hint of homosexual activity. To be in love with your pals is so normal, the question must be addressed. (Disappointingly, the evidence for Tocqueville is ambiguous.)

LA replies:

We’ve also had some book arguing that Lincoln was homosexual. It reminds me of the time I was at the Fraunces Tavern in downtown New York (site of George Washington’s farewell to his officers) and happened to hear a lecture by a New York psychiatrist about the feud between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that led to Hamilton’s death in a duel. Guess what his theme was. The fight between them was driven by suppressed homosexual attraction. We went to this American historical museum, and ended up hearing a liberal New York psychiatrist, evidencing an obvious desire to tear down the American founders (similar to Freud’s agenda as analyzed by John Murray Cuddidy in his classic The Ordeal of Civility), tell us that this tragedy of early America was really all about homosexuality.

Apart from the perverse destructiveness of this approach to the past, it’s all so boringly predictable and mediocre. It’s like living in an ideological regime—correct, we ARE living in an ideological regime. Every functionary of the regime, high or low, knows without being told the tropes and language to use.

To take an example completely unrelated to the debunking of Tocqueville or or U.S. history, have you noticed how in movies of the last ten or fifteen years, no kiss is EVER initiated by the man? In EVERY movie “love” scene, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the kiss is initiated by the woman, and if the characters are sitting or prone, the woman is above the man. And then, just as invariably, once the woman has initiated the kiss and is above the man, the man then moves to the usual position, above the woman. But first it has to be established that the woman initiates the contact and is on top.

Now, is there a Party Official present at the set of EVERY movie made in America for the last ten years who makes sure the kiss is done according to the required protocols? I don’t think so. We don’t even have studios any more, let alone Soviet-style political functionaries. Nevertheless, all these movie directors, without fail, portray every kiss according to the same pattern. Everyone knows the “grammar” of these love scenes, the tropes of the liberal culture, and follows them invariably.

And furthermore, has any movie critic ever pointed out this strange, quasi-totalitarian phenomenon? No. Which makes it Kafkaesque. Meaning that the surreal is taken for granted as normal.

Now, here’s another question. How many men and women do you think actually relate to the idea of the woman aggressively initiating the kiss or being on top of the man? I don’t believe it would be that many (I may be wrong). Yet everyone in our society accepts without protest, without the slightest comment, this ubiquitous, unreal, propagandized portrayal of sex.

An Indian living in the West writes:

I commend Laura W as one of your brightest, most perceptive, well read, thoughtful and educated readers. Her dissection of that liberal ass Brogan was very good. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

These liberal “deconstructionists”—they abound in academia. I don’t know if Laura or any of your other readers have ever seen these people at work in the universities. They have destroyed higher education. It has become almost impossible for any young person in America to get a decent liberal arts education in a university—with a few handful of exceptions that apply to some small colleges where serious professors and teachers have found refuge. The rest of academia is a complete wasteland.

The academics like to feel superior to the great writers. It is like a flashlight run on batteries trying to show how it is brighter than the sun. Absurd doesn’t even begin to describe it. Nietzsche had this to say about the scholars: I say more in a sentence than they say in ten books.

Paul K. writes:

The heavy hand of liberal ideology started squeezing the life out of books from the 1970s on. It seems that it’s now impossible for an author to mention Nazism, slavery, or colonialism without inserting a short lecture on how we are supposed to regard such things, and then hammering home the disapproval with a regular application of pejorative adjectives. As a reader I find this so irritating that I tend to gravitate to books written before that period.

As for the “was he or wasn’t he?” speculation, or what we might term “retroactive gaydar,” it has become absurd. James Reston’s “Warriors of God,” about the Third Crusade, takes it for granted that Richard I was homosexual while offering no evidence that would convince anyone not eager to suspend disbelief. Richard’s disagreements with France’s King Philip are always knowingly described as “lover’s quarrels.”

The example you mention regarding the Burr-Hamilton duel is a new one on me. There was a theory making the rounds of academia that the duel was provoked by Hamilton suggesting that Burr had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Theodosia. Bright and accomplished, Theodosia was the only of Burr’s four children to survive to adulthood and he adored her. The idea that there must be more than meets the eye to this relationship sheds very little light on history but a great deal on the sick obsessions of today. The concept of personal honor is so foreign to our intellectuals that they seek some casus belli with which they can more easily relate.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2007 05:32 PM | Send