StephenKMackSD's Blog

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) like the Establishment Republican, Paul Ryan and the Tea Party’s Michele Bachmann has decided to give his own version of national political sermonizing called the State of the Union Address. Now there is nothing to compare to the love, even the addiction, of CP for long winded abstract theorizing, it’s his intellectual bread and butter: the opportunity to woo an audience with pretentious high flown phraseology, in service to the master idea of American Exceptionalism, is an occasion for pulling out all the stops. Boosterism and the pep talk are American perennials. He unenthusiastically makes the president’s choice of styles of address between standard and visionary approaches. After that CP proceeds to deliver his own address full of the afore-mentioned rhetorical devices properly inflated for the occasion. CP writes two columns a week and this has the feel of something written over his morning coffee with a deadline staring him in the face. Even the title, ‘The Talent Magnet’ has a shopworn quality and the assertion of ‘what the country hungers for’ leads one to the unpalatable notion of a decisive paternalism, as the indispensable key to success, in the proscribed realm of national occasion: an evocation of a necessary political nostalgia wedded to masculine privilege, as sine qua non.       

A Robert Penn Warren quote, neatly manicured for political purposes, opens this essay.The Great Will (TGW) has found the intellectual rationalization that so many have been searching for and it lies in a obscure and long forgotten book, by the eminent American thinker,theorist and servant of the American Empire, Samuel P. Huntington. The book in which the answer is found is 'American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony' from 1981. TGW  even argues that the present political situation is a vindication of Huntington's prescience. And it is made to order for the political polemic that is the thought and political advocacy of TGW. Huntington's love of capacious  Platonic Abstraction is everywhere evident in the derivative thought of TGW, as expressed in such words and phrases as: America is a creedal nation, We are in the midst of a recurrence, liberalism succumbed to statism, disharmonic society,dominant conceptions of human nature, center right country, creedal passions, first principals, the creed's core skepticism about government, modern liberalism's handicap: in sum an indictment of the present resurgence of political liberalism, or better yet a neo-liberalism with a heavily socialist direction. As we know the Revolutionary faith of the Founders and the country they made was reconstructed after the Civil War, as the first Union had failed.The second time America was remade was in the aftermath of The Great Depression via Franklin Roosevelt and The New Deal.  Yet, TGW would argue that as a nation we drifted into a  negative political romance with Keynesian economics and liberal social engineering: this being a leitmotif of his political philosophizing. Mr. Huntington's ideas/arguments and vocabulary provide the necessary ideas and concepts, that enable the construction of a complex historical/rhetorical frame, as demonstrable of the legitimacy of the Tea Party and its generation of  'fear and frenzy, the exaggerations and the enthusiasm, the general sense of social corruption and disorder'.
If, as a reader, you would find a more dispassionate, well written, review and precis of Mr. Huntington's book more congenial, I have provided a link:

http://marieljohn.blogspot.com/2010/02/american-politics-promise-of-disharmony.html