In furtherance of my one-line snap judgment of Fred's latest debate performance, it's fascinating, telling, and intriguingly American that Fred Thompson's rejoinder to accusations of laziness comes in two stabs: one, I'm a successful politician; two, I'm a virile family man. Regardless of how seriously you take Fred, or his campaign style, this dual line of defense makes a remarkable contrast with the portrait of true laziness that Fred put forth as the means and end of big-L Liberalism --
[a] comfortable mediocrity that would bring us neither peace nor prosperity. [This] liberal philosophy must be rejected at all costs.
Personally, Fred remains open to the charge that his whole career is a testament to the perquisites of comfortable mediocrity. But comparing his line of defense to the preoccupations of another critic of comfortable mediocrity -- the French novelist Stendhal -- makes matters considerably more complicated.
In his searing critique of French salon society, Red and Black, Stendhal gives us Julien Sorel, a charming, ambitious outsider presented with a central crisis:
Like Hercules, he found himself faced with a choice, not between vice and virtue but between comfortable mediocrity and the heroic dreams of youth.
Struggling to attain Napoleon-like grandeur in the social, not political, milieu of bourgeois Restoration France, Julien spirals deep, while rising upward, into a closed world of intrigue, manners, scheming, adultery, deceit, and hypocrisy. Stendhal suggests that the pursuit of uncomfortable greatness is a torturous and destructive undertaking -- at least when that struggle takes place within the cruel and trick-filled realm of society.
But what about the pursuit of uncomfortable greatness in the realm of politics -- specifically, democratic politics? Now Fred's claim that his political rise reflects such a pursuit is thrown into a much different relief. Because, as Tocqueville took pains to point out, politics in America was characteristically and generally not the place Americans went to impress their fellows and establish grand reputations. Instead, Tocqueville noted, Americans pursued uncomfortable greatness much the way Mitt Romney did before he got into politics. Indeed, Tocqueville suggested that, because political offices rotated so frequently and failed to offer the lucrative opportunities of the American private sector, American politics was divvied up between undistinguished men and a kind of already-successful caretakers of competence. Anyone with real ambitions set out to be great privately, often willing to endure great discomfort in the process.
Curiously, however, few titans walked the landscape of Democracy in America. The sort of heroism Tocqueville thought typical in America was that of the oceangoing merchant:
An American navigator leaves Boston to go and buy tea in China. He arrives at Canton, stays a few days there, and comes back. In less than two years he has gone around the whole globe, and only once has he seen land. Throughout a voyage of eight or ten months he has drunk brackish water and eaten salted meat; he has striven continually against the sea, disease, and boredom; but on his return he can sell tea a farthing cheaper than an English merchant can: he has attained his aim.
I cannot express my thoughts better than by saying that the Americans put something heroic into their way of trading.
This seemed so important to Tocqueville he pretty much ended his first volume of Democracy in America on that note. Now: Fred Thompson is no heroic Bostonian seafarer. His acting career is a separate question, worth a post on its own, but his political career, though he speaks of it in precisely the right idiom to capture both the American imagination and the American experience, is precisely the wrong career to do so accurately and effectively. Americans know what a politician is, and, with vanishingly rare exceptions, a politician is not a hero.
Perhaps something like a subconscious recognition of this fact drove Fred to actually interrupt Fox's closing ceremonies to announce that the best proof that he had fire in the belly was that he had fire in the loins. Paradoxically, this is much better. Americans do know what a father is, and what a family is. Since heroism never played such a big role in American politics because we were all born and raised in a democratic, not aristocratic, political civilization, Americans have always inclined to recognize and respect the heroic accomplishments of common people who achieve uncommon success through uncommon effort in common pursuits. One of the most important of these is family. Who is a bigger 'everyday hero' in the modern American mythos than the moms and dads who work and labor to sustain happy, healthy families inside and outside of the home?
Fred's evocation of the American solution to the problem of achieving uncomfortable greatness -- though he is an imperfect messenger -- contrasts sharply with what Stendhal gives us: the feverish and contemptuous rejection of both an honest, lucrative job (on offer from his dear woodcutter friend) and an honest, fruitful family (he joylessly beds the prize maiden of Paris for the sake of his social status). There's one ready reason that accounts for such a stark alternative: Stendhal's Julien Sorel is, as Tocqueville knew, that most un-American of characters, the peasant.
But surely there's more to be said here. As America reentangled itself in the affairs of Europe and rose to its present integral place in the fabric of a broader civilization, in many ways we became less uniquely American. The pressures Tocqueville thought Americans wouldn't have to face in the way Europeans had to seem to be stronger now: we lack an open and bountiful geographic frontier (though our freedom and range of movement is still unparalleled); we lack the habits and mores of local political administration that Tocqueville saw as the bulwark of our responsible freedom; and we have gained a huge, growing Federal-National government, a management apparatus global in its purvey over domestic affairs and dedicated to an open-ended investiture in world affairs that seems to require a similar role. For many, especially, after the 1950s, the young, the bourgeois heroism of job and family seems to have grown ironic quotation marks: "bigger prisons," longer chains, to evoke, fittingly, both Max Weber and the (International) Noise Conspiracy.
Nowadays, the temptation is strong to try to achieve power and greatness, striving and pride, and eros and anger by constructing an individual personality -- a unique, authentic self which is a personal work of art. This foreign desire has swelled greatly in America -- aroused in no small part by its dark neuter amanuensis, Andy Warhol -- as both creative genius has been democratized (in a combination of postwar wealth and leisure and neo-Freudian ideas) and democratic politics has become a feeble parody of its former self. Like Arendt said, increasingly we have sought freedom from politics. Not, mind you, freedom from the sporadic and perennial fevers of national power struggles, but from the daily effort of administering our own local political affairs. As leisure, wealth, and art have become increasingly open to the mass participation of increasingly self-aware individuals, we have sought to outsource our politics to the experts, and put our experts to work for those whose conception of national power best accords with our personal desires.
You are right if you guess that I think this is a very bad idea. The tragedy of American politics today is that in searching for alternatives to Julien Sorel we are presented time and again with Fred Thompsons. But the silver lining, which others have recognized too, is that Fred Thompson's very approach to politics is so strikingly relaxed that it makes us remember suddenly that the President of the United States need not always, and maybe almost always should not, be a Hercules. For the habit of that kind of power-worship only feeds our political liberty into the mouth of oppressive government, draining away the political habits in our memories and our communities that help guarantee that liberty. Whereupon, fevered, questing, ambitious creatures that we are, we channel all our obsessions for recognition and satisfaction into just the scheming, lying, cruelty, and hypocrisy of destructive social competition that Stendhal warned us would be our fate.
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