Re: <nettime> Fascist "trolls," meta

Johnatan,

I read Tocqueville's Democracy In America a very long time ago. My recollection is that he outlines a version of Plato's argument from The Republic, in which Plato claims that despotism is the necessary outcome of "too much freedom"--a very precise definition of freedom from a Platonist point of view, by which he meant not freedom so much as teleology and a theory of ideal forms, and everyone in their proper place.I am not a Platonist. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/90/191676/art-of-life-art-of-war-movement-un-common-forms-and-infrastructure/

But Tocqueville's Catholic and aristocratic background explains far more of his claims about the "secularism" of American politics and law, and the depiction of America as lacking in religiosity. (Marx, by contrast, described the states of America as a land of religiosity par excellence, and I tend to agree.) The distinction between private faith (and attributes) and public secularism is not the absence of religion, but grounded in Protestant theologies of freedom and redemption. I make no argument for either religion. More pointing out that Tocqueville's account of democracy in America is, at its base, a Catholic account of Protestantism. It's not uncommon, today even, to come across people using 'liberalism' as a euphemism for Protestantism. But as I said, I don't see myself as a conscript in some nineteenth-century kulturkampf between Protestants and Catholics.

The idealisation of the Roman Empire strikes me as misguided as does the idealisation of ancient Greece. I do not think they were run for the good of the slaves in either.

Angela

On Wed, 7 Nov 2018 at 11:44, Johnatan Petterson <[email protected]> wrote:

hy.
thank you for the thoughts suggested into me from your writing.
i have obviously not been educated enough in US Politics to find an audience in my reply,
i wish i knew if the Toqueville book i am currently reading on Democracy in USA
(shall along my further reading )cross refer(s ) this following idea from Arendt On Revolution.
ie.It seems in On Revolution Arendt elaborates on the French Revolution, she seems
to say it defers from Founding Fathers in that they had no guidance from the Bible.
i would say you could find in Nazi preoccupation with OldGreek architecture and Viennese architecture
somekind of an ideal, just like the memes within our modern civilisations. it something which perhaps
a philosopher would call a Limit, a Horizon, a Value or a Metric. this explains why the Barbarians had somehow a religion,
even if they did not believe in the Common Good. I would not be surprised to discover (later, in Toqueville) that the Founding Fathers of your Democracy
believed in some Common Good. yet believing in the Common Good is quite difficult, is quite exceptional, which explains why perhaps Arendt
could say (i have not read that book on Eishmann) this was just another a ordinary man. the Horizon certainly was a Monster. i am
curious to discover everything about his sexual approach to this. it is like Spinoza something it is possible to enjoy,
laugh at, even if from a distance, limited, by any means imaginable?

I wrote this some time ago on the media's fascination with Nazi profile pieces: https://s0metim3s.com/2017/12/05/arendt-banality-nazism/