It takes centuries for detached analysis of civilizations. The white settlement of North America is now in its fifth century. There is an extensive written record.
The first white settlers fled religious persecution in Great Britain. They were zealots, obsessive, with a persecution complex.
Immediate post-revolution America was uneducated and anti-education, crude, courageous, nervous, grandiose, violent, and drunk.1 Of higher education there was almost none. Everyone noticed these strains. Tocqueville noted the mad nervous energy in the strident cacophony of new emigrants at the docks 2 and the heightened nervous excitability every four years;3 Dickens saw the primitive conditions, and the strong, uncouth, malodorous New Man who was making this new world.4 We can read their manner of speech and grandiose thought in Huckleberry Finn. Those who lived through the Civil War remarked on their consumed, four year, dream-like state. "Was it not real?" they asked themselves and each other. They were anti-intellectual, anti-philosophical, anti-artistic, and anti-literary, strains that continue to the present. People who write are worthless curiosities.5 “Our country is called, as it is, practical”. 6 The only homegrown American philosophy is Pragmatism.
The intellectual product of the proto-Americans, when the people who wrote did so, is, with centuries hindsight, embarrassing.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--"
What you cannot see is self-evident.
From unseen, unseeable, self-evident "reality" to imperative. It was,
"the moral duty of the people, at all times, to pursue their own happiness." 7 (emphasis added)
It is a bankrupt argument. Tocqueville:
"It is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the American rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. In the pursuit...he is goaded onwards by a passion more intense than the love of life. [it is greed]...These men left their first country to improve their condition; they quit their resting-place to ameliorate it still more; fortune awaits them everywhere, but happiness they cannot attain. The desire of prosperity is become an ardent and restless passion in their minds which grows by what it gains."8
Rome was the model of the Founding Fathers. The people of the New Republic soon forced a different Ancient for "by 1800 Americans were already known for pushing and shoving one another in public”, "almost at war with one another."9
"Violence was perhaps no more common than it had been earlier, but now it seemed more bizarre. During the forty-five years between 1780 and 1825...ten of the twelve multiple family murders...reported...from the seventeenth century through 1900" occurred. 10
Belief in the perfectibility of man mandated a view of progress as from a state of barbarism to ever refined civilization. "But in the settlement of North America the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism."11
This new man, the American:
"As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is him himself..."12
Thus Trump supporters. Surveying this material with which the New Republic was being made it occurred to one of the leading intellectuals of the time that a different mold than Rome was required, the “’fierce democratie’ of Athens."
Yeah, Athens, that's the ticket.
"Athens was certainly a free state; free to licentiousness, free to madness."
"The rich were arbitrarily pillaged..., the great were banished..., the wise sacrificed to the fury of the populace."
"Still however it was for this lawless, merciless people, that the most chastised, accomplished literature, which the world has known, was produced."13
Anything for the arts.
1. "Everything seemed to be coming apart, and murder, suicide, theft, and mobbing became increasingly common...The drinking of hard liquor became...especially common...By the second or third decade of the nineteenth century American consumption of distilled spirits reached an all-time high...more than triple today's consumption and greater than that of any major European nation at the time." The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, 306 (1992)
2. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, 290 (1835)
3. "The epoch of the election of a President of the United States may be considered as a crisis in the affairs of the nation...For a long while before the appointed time is at hand the election becomes the most important and the all-engrossing topic of discussion. The President...no longer governs for the interest of the State, but for that of his re-election...and instead of checking its passions, as his duty commands him to do, he frequently courts its worst caprices. As the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase;...the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the public papers, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present." Democracy in America 153-4.
Tocqueville was in America in 1835. In 1824 Andrew Jackson, Trump's model, contested for the presidency. Albert Gallatin, the Democratic-Republican candidate for vice president characterized Jackson who "from incapacity, military habits, and habitual disregard of laws and constitutional provisions, altogether unfit for the office." Henry Clay threw his support to John Quincy Adams and Jackson was defeated. For ever after Jackson alleged that a "corrupt bargain" had deprived him of the presidency,he broke the Democratic-Republican Party and founded the Democratic party. In the election of 1828 he defeated Adams by a landslide. In 1835 when Tocqueville arrived in America Jackson had survived the first assassination attempt on a president. Jackson held office for eight years, until 1837. Andrew_Jackson#Election_of_1824
The first newspaper that Tocqueville read in America contained this indictment of Jackson: "the language of Jackson has been that of a heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority. Ambition is his crime...he governs by means of corruption...but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings...and to end his days in some retirement, where he may curse his madness at his leisure." Democracy in America, Tocqueville 211.
4. American Notes, Charles Dickens, see e.g. pp 102-5 (1842)
5. A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton 120 (1934)
6. An Oration Pronounced at Cambridge, Edward Everett (1824)
7. Charles Nisbet (1787)
8. Democracy in America 341-2.
9. The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood (1992) pp 306-7.
10. Wood, 307, citing to inter alia “…Multiple Parricide and the Rejection of Revelation in the Early National Period…”, Neil K. Fitzgerald (1971) (emphasis added. Wonder where they got the idea of parricide?)
11. The Panoplist and Missionary Herald, XIV (1818), quoted in Wood, 311.
12. Democracy in America, Tocqueville 283
13. Everett.
The first white settlers fled religious persecution in Great Britain. They were zealots, obsessive, with a persecution complex.
Immediate post-revolution America was uneducated and anti-education, crude, courageous, nervous, grandiose, violent, and drunk.1 Of higher education there was almost none. Everyone noticed these strains. Tocqueville noted the mad nervous energy in the strident cacophony of new emigrants at the docks 2 and the heightened nervous excitability every four years;3 Dickens saw the primitive conditions, and the strong, uncouth, malodorous New Man who was making this new world.4 We can read their manner of speech and grandiose thought in Huckleberry Finn. Those who lived through the Civil War remarked on their consumed, four year, dream-like state. "Was it not real?" they asked themselves and each other. They were anti-intellectual, anti-philosophical, anti-artistic, and anti-literary, strains that continue to the present. People who write are worthless curiosities.5 “Our country is called, as it is, practical”. 6 The only homegrown American philosophy is Pragmatism.
The intellectual product of the proto-Americans, when the people who wrote did so, is, with centuries hindsight, embarrassing.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--"
What you cannot see is self-evident.
From unseen, unseeable, self-evident "reality" to imperative. It was,
"the moral duty of the people, at all times, to pursue their own happiness." 7 (emphasis added)
It is a bankrupt argument. Tocqueville:
"It is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the American rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. In the pursuit...he is goaded onwards by a passion more intense than the love of life. [it is greed]...These men left their first country to improve their condition; they quit their resting-place to ameliorate it still more; fortune awaits them everywhere, but happiness they cannot attain. The desire of prosperity is become an ardent and restless passion in their minds which grows by what it gains."8
Rome was the model of the Founding Fathers. The people of the New Republic soon forced a different Ancient for "by 1800 Americans were already known for pushing and shoving one another in public”, "almost at war with one another."9
"Violence was perhaps no more common than it had been earlier, but now it seemed more bizarre. During the forty-five years between 1780 and 1825...ten of the twelve multiple family murders...reported...from the seventeenth century through 1900" occurred. 10
Belief in the perfectibility of man mandated a view of progress as from a state of barbarism to ever refined civilization. "But in the settlement of North America the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism."11
This new man, the American:
"As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is him himself..."12
Thus Trump supporters. Surveying this material with which the New Republic was being made it occurred to one of the leading intellectuals of the time that a different mold than Rome was required, the “’fierce democratie’ of Athens."
Yeah, Athens, that's the ticket.
"Athens was certainly a free state; free to licentiousness, free to madness."
"The rich were arbitrarily pillaged..., the great were banished..., the wise sacrificed to the fury of the populace."
"Still however it was for this lawless, merciless people, that the most chastised, accomplished literature, which the world has known, was produced."13
Anything for the arts.
1. "Everything seemed to be coming apart, and murder, suicide, theft, and mobbing became increasingly common...The drinking of hard liquor became...especially common...By the second or third decade of the nineteenth century American consumption of distilled spirits reached an all-time high...more than triple today's consumption and greater than that of any major European nation at the time." The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, 306 (1992)
2. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, 290 (1835)
3. "The epoch of the election of a President of the United States may be considered as a crisis in the affairs of the nation...For a long while before the appointed time is at hand the election becomes the most important and the all-engrossing topic of discussion. The President...no longer governs for the interest of the State, but for that of his re-election...and instead of checking its passions, as his duty commands him to do, he frequently courts its worst caprices. As the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase;...the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the public papers, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present." Democracy in America 153-4.
Tocqueville was in America in 1835. In 1824 Andrew Jackson, Trump's model, contested for the presidency. Albert Gallatin, the Democratic-Republican candidate for vice president characterized Jackson who "from incapacity, military habits, and habitual disregard of laws and constitutional provisions, altogether unfit for the office." Henry Clay threw his support to John Quincy Adams and Jackson was defeated. For ever after Jackson alleged that a "corrupt bargain" had deprived him of the presidency,he broke the Democratic-Republican Party and founded the Democratic party. In the election of 1828 he defeated Adams by a landslide. In 1835 when Tocqueville arrived in America Jackson had survived the first assassination attempt on a president. Jackson held office for eight years, until 1837. Andrew_Jackson#Election_of_1824
The first newspaper that Tocqueville read in America contained this indictment of Jackson: "the language of Jackson has been that of a heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority. Ambition is his crime...he governs by means of corruption...but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings...and to end his days in some retirement, where he may curse his madness at his leisure." Democracy in America, Tocqueville 211.
4. American Notes, Charles Dickens, see e.g. pp 102-5 (1842)
5. A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton 120 (1934)
6. An Oration Pronounced at Cambridge, Edward Everett (1824)
7. Charles Nisbet (1787)
8. Democracy in America 341-2.
9. The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood (1992) pp 306-7.
10. Wood, 307, citing to inter alia “…Multiple Parricide and the Rejection of Revelation in the Early National Period…”, Neil K. Fitzgerald (1971) (emphasis added. Wonder where they got the idea of parricide?)
11. The Panoplist and Missionary Herald, XIV (1818), quoted in Wood, 311.
12. Democracy in America, Tocqueville 283
13. Everett.