To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the right’s support. It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules. Yet conservatism began life as an enemy of liberalism and never fully abandoned its reservations about democracy.
The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.”
I disagree with Keynes, at least in part and regarding the U.S. military. I believe that most of the top brass have spoken out in commitment to democracy & the rule of law ("liberalism") and have remained committed to the American tradition of civilian control of the military and to non-interference in politics.
The concept of Love (philia), in fact, figures large in Epicurean axiology. The noble nature devotes itself to wisdom and love, of which the first is a mortal god, the second immortal.
The peculiar political unreality and traditionalism among anti-Stalinists seems to be closely connected with the general political situation in this country. All totalitarian movements, but Bolshevism even more today than Nazism a decade ago, are completely absent from the American domestic scene. All that Bolshevism actually means today is a possible menace from abroad, helped by domestic espionage, with the result that anti-Stalinists think more and more exclusively in terms of foreign policy. Since they have no contact with and little lively interest in politics as the realm of the statesman, they have degenerated into armchair strategists who marshal the forces of the world for and against Stalin. The new emphasis on foreign policy is what chiefly distinguishes present-day anti-Stalinism from earlier forms of anti-totalitarianism like Trotskyism or anti-fascism. Although fascist groups in this country were never very strong, they existed nevertheless. The fact, moreover, that totalitarian and partially totalitarian dictatorships of the fascist brand had sometimes been helped to power by the native bourgeoisie (the significance of which was greatly overrated by all Marxists) led American anti-fascists, rightly or wrongly, to believe “it can happen here,” which naturally gave them a personal stake in the struggle and revealed to them certain possibilities for action at home.
How does Arendt's assessment of anti-Communists ("anti-Stalinists") and her assessment of U.S. politics written around 1949 compare with the current U.S. situation? It seems to me that we currently have a strong proto-fascist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal political movement at work in our country. It's a minority, but because of a variety of factors, it has an out-sized influence on policy and events.
Focus lets us intentionally form and file symbols. With it, we temporarily hire the librarian to pull specific symbols from the paralimbic library and then escort them into the higher brain areas. Focus is a kind of wedge at the root of everything we do. It’s as easy as breathing. It allows us to take control of how we want to experience the world. However, we can’t focus all the time. Instead, we use focus to help give the limbic librarian new instructions for how to continue when we’re not paying attention.
Against this image of continuous human progress, which inspired the whole Enlightenment, not least the philosophy of Kant, [Walter] Benjamin places the logic of disruptive intervention, later called “Chok” (shock). The quintessential Chok events, which both bring down extant entire images of the world and create new ones, are “origins” (Ur-Sprünge, literally “primal leaps”)...
Any chok about today?
