The Brooklyn Rail

“I do not think, on the whole, that there is more selfishness among us than in America; the only difference is that there it is enlightened, here it is not. Each American knows when to sacrifice some of his private interests to save the rest; we want to save everything, and often we lose it all.”

–Alexis de Tocqueville

 

“A bamboo that bends is stronger than an oak that resists.”

–Japanese proverb

  

On a rainy morning, sometime in May of 1851, Herman Melville wrote a long letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne with an apologetic yet remarkable excuse for his failure to visit his friend as he had promised for quite some time. It was in this very letter that he described his “ruthless democracy,” implying what had prevented him to take his “pine-board chariot” from his home in Pittsfield to Hawthorne’s home in Concord, Massachusetts—the distance between the two locations could have required days by horse then, though it would take only two and a half hours by car today.

While describing to Hawthorne his “ruthless democracy,” Melville says he has been “completely done up” by his work on the farm, from planting his “famous” corn and potato crops to building, patching, tinkering away in all directions of daily labor and maintenance. Melville proposed his so-called “ruthless democracy” as his counter-friction against another admirable term that he invented: the “aristocracy of the brain.” What Melville meant by this was whatever the daily process of work entailed—be it thinking, observing, reflecting, and writing in his study, or be it out in the farm seeding, rooting, and growing. All these activities, from the literary to the philosophical to the agricultural and the political, must be treated with equal weight and urgency. One feels Melville’s struggle to be similar to Tocqueville’s concept of the predicament of the tyranny of the minority vs. the tyranny of the majority, stated a decade earlier. By connecting mutuality and mutiny, heaven and hell, peace and war, democracy by its virtue can be both capacious and changeable. The constant friction between the elements within it needs to be constantly tended to with equal attention and care, not ever favoring one over another. Its very fragility can be its strength, but it needs every single American to be mindful of democracy’s great potential as a chemical agent through which natural processes and human activities become indistinguishable from each other.

America is a nation of extreme contradictions. It is capable of losing its mojo by a self-effacing inferiority complex compared to other old cultures in the world, but also capable of expressing a strong sense of self-entitlement, arrogance, and narcissism in order to assert supremacy. When we look back to the history of our democratic republic, we realize how many times we’ve survived epic wreckages, be it the Civil War, Hitler Germany, Hirohito Japan, Khrushchev USSR, Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or Vietnam War. It’s true that the three plus decades without an enemy after the collapse of Soviet Union and the end of Cold War I in 1991 brought profound complacency and excessive overconfidence. If we read Anthony Lake’s 1993 speech “From Containment to Enlargement,” which became the Clinton doctrine, we know now that Cold War II is real and imminent, with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other less powerful autocracies working together in sophisticated networks of kleptocratic financial structures, security services, and professional propagandists. It’s equally true that our election cycle was created to provide good governance, as each elected president and his party was to fulfill the voter’s responsiveness to the electorate and accountability for the rule of law. If we were to think of the longevity of past republican constitutions—such as the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires, among others—we know what eventually led to their downfalls was always the result of intense partisanship that hardened party affiliations to the point of extreme sectarianism.

What is most important in this country is to preserve the rule of law. And this has been violated by elected officials on both sides of the political spectrum. For example, at the time of Biden’s departure from the White House, he granted more clemency requests than any prior president—including the preemptive pardons of some political allies and members of his family. And this is not so dissimilar to Trump’s own pardons of people like Steve Bannon, the January 6 rioters, and many others. At this point, we’re aware that the pathology in our democratic republic means that either of the losing sides will be persecuted by warfare. The same can be said of both breaking or abusing executive power, which can also lead to disastrous outcomes. It is especially troubling to see that Trump’s greatest desire is apparently to become an imperial president with one clear domestic mandate—namely, confronting the issue of illegal immigration by aggressively deporting millions of immigrants. And this comes at the cost of not having any other foreign policies in view to win Cold War II.

Today’s most critical crisis is the Congress’s failure to uphold Article I in our Constitution, which is in part a reflection of the three-decade-long vaingloriousness that led to this degradation of fiscal oversight, among other malfunctions. The election of Donald Trump is in many ways a symptom of what the nation has been through. As it is said Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once stated, “A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to peer out.”

And yet there is a lot to be optimistic about. While America has its profound imperfections and has shown itself to be susceptible to violent swings of destructive extremity, it’s comforting to know that we have had 25 percent of global GDP since 1880. Again, it’s good to remind ourselves that Trump’s first-quarter approval rating is only 45 percent, never mind the much-smaller percentage of his base. So, we must try to take comfort in the fact that our voting system has proven to be good in the past, and that we can hope that our re-corrective mechanism can once again work—that our ability to reform can outweigh any autocratic regime. In the last analysis, we are a freedom-loving people, who will resist violent suppression of our rights. And we should remind ourselves that in its 248-year-long history, America has never seen its identity as fixed, as with other world cultures in their long histories. America is more about creating and recreating itself as an identity in-the-making, so to speak, every four years. As long as she can maintain an equilibrium between her “ruthless democracy” and “aristocracy of the brain,” her dynamism will prove itself once again to be simply astonishing.

Onward, upward with love, courage, and cosmic optimism as ever,

Phong H. Bui

 

P.S. This issue is dedicated to our friends and mentors Kathan Brown (1935–2025), Elsa Honig Fine (1930–2025), and Max Kozloff (1933–2025), all of whom have made profound contributions with their respective broadening generosities in the fields of printmaking, writing about art, and art criticism, and Pope Francis (1936–2025) for his advocacy of compassion and the importance of spirituality. We’d like to send our deep condolences to their beloved family members, colleagues, and admirers here in the US and abroad. May the party of equality again be friends with the party of liberty as Alexis de Tocqueville once recognized this relationship in America’s early formation. Lastly, we’re thrilled to announce Cal McKeever as Associate Curator of Rail Curatorial Projects, maintaining his invaluable assistance to everything our living organism requires to continue thriving with fluidity and joy.