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The Downside of Liberty
...Consider America during the two decades after World War II. Stereotypically but also in fact, the conformist pressures of bourgeois social norms were powerful. To dress or speak or live life in unorthodox, extravagantly individualist ways required real gumption. Yet just as beatniks were rare and freakish, so were proudly money-mad Ayn Randian millionaires. My conservative Republican father thought marginal income tax rates of 91 percent were unfairly high, but he and his friends never dreamed of suggesting they be reduced below, say, 50 percent. Sex outside marriage was shameful, beards and divorce were outré — but so were boasting of one’s wealth and blaming unfortunates for their hard luck. When I was growing up in Omaha, rich people who could afford to build palatial houses did not and wouldn’t dream of paying themselves 200 or 400 times what they paid their employees. Greed as well as homosexuality was a love that dared not speak its name.

But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed.

Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.

“Do your own thing” is not so different than “every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. The self-absorbed “Me” Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the “Me” Half-Century....

Touré Descends Into Self-Parody On The Cycle, Calls For Government Mandate Upon Mandate
...“Government must pull us into the future even as a large swath of the electorate kicks against and screams against it like petulant children.” He continued on to say that opposition to the health-insurance mandate will fade over time because “the people are sometimes like Mikey from that old Life cereal commercial; they hate it until they don’t.”

Seriously? “The people” … are like the petulant child from a cereal commercial? What condescension. You almost want to believe this some elaborate theater act where Touré parodies the quintessential “holier than thou” big government liberal. But maybe not. He continued on:

“Perhaps if there’s a second term for Obama after health care is enacted and people see it working well and get used to it, he’ll float to a new level of power.”

Yeah! If and when the unwashed masses accept the president’s health-insurance mandate, he’ll float to some magical new level of executive power, uninhibited by those pesky obstacles like, you know, the constitution or democracy or, ugh, personal liberty.

And on this Cloud Nine of Power, what would Touré like President Obama to do?

“Maybe he’ll go even further trying to bolster his legacy by enacting new paternalistic mandates meant to make the nation better. Saying all Americans must vote, because government works better when all participate in selecting leaders. Eat your vegetables! Maybe mandate that all citizens must go to some sort of post high school college — maybe liberal arts, maybe technical — because America works better when we are better educated and trained. Eat your vegetables! How about a mandate of a year or two of public service after college?”...

...Well, hey, Touré said exactly that: “I’m just saying, sometimes the people don’t know what’s best for them.”...

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David Brooks: The Follower Problem
...Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.

To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.