Status Updates From Arendt and America

…American policy from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan up to and including the war in Vietnam presupposed an ‘inability or unwillingness to consult experience and learn from reality’ and the result was a ‘disregard for the actual consequences of action.’ Supposedly pragmatic Americans had abandoned reality testing and succumbed to fantasies and images.

What was perhaps good for stability was, as Arendt recognized, a blow to direct participation in government. Still, once the constitution was accepted, the American political system tended to lodge sovereignty in various documents and institutions. This thwarted the possibility of one or a few individuals speaking in the name of the people.

Arendt’s Eichmann emerged as a failed self, one lacking in capacity to think about others or himself with any insight.

Disagreements in liberal thought were settled by an agreement to disagree; in the world Arendt had barely escaped, disagreement was settled by incarceration, exile, or execution…Common sense was not an adequate way of negotiating the world of totalitarianism.

For many students of America, Tocqueville’s work has always seemed the founding text in American “exceptionalism,” even when he was critical of the new republic. For the more somber minded, his penetrating explorations of America in the 1830s seemed to foreshadow the conformist, at times totalitarian, tendencies of modern mass society, especially in America.

It (ideology) sought to create a new reality, rather than reflecting what existed. Most important, in both totalitarian regimes the camp system was central to their aim of creating a new sort of human being and society.