I know. This so-called blog is a frivolous mixture of clowns, guns, side-swipes at random mountebanks and anything else I care to get into. But here's some serious thought, from Guido De Ruggiero, summarizing Tocqueville:
“As compared with old-fashioned personal despotism, this new despotism which is growing up in the democratic nations of our day is more sweeping and less painful; it degrades men without torturing them. It expresses itself through an absolute State power, detailed, uniform, provident, and mild, which would be paternal had it been designed to prepare men for a life of maturity; but its true intention is to arrest them permanently at the stage of infancy.”
Ruggiero was writing in the 1920s, Tocqueville in the 1830s and I'd say both are right on the money today.
Thanks, DC, for that.
Cheers,
LSP
