RUEFUL MUSINGS

I wrote In Defense of Anarchism when I was thirty-one [though it was not published until five years later.]  It was a youthful work, full of insouciant bravado.  How apt were Wordsworth’s lines, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven.”  The argument of my little tract was so simple that it could have been stated in a short paragraph with room left over for embellishment.  Further along in the text, I drew on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous critique of English representative democracy to break a lance for something I imagined as television democracy [“The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament: for as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.  And thus, by the use they make of their brief moments of liberty, they deserve to lose it.”]

Television democracy rested on the conviction that men and women, offered the opportunity to give direct legislative expression to their desires and convictions, could be relied on to inform themselves, vote their interests, and set aside irrational hatreds and anxieties.

It is more than half a century since I wrote that tract, and in this terrible election season, I am forced to reflect that it is perhaps Yeats rather than Wordsworth to whom I must look for guidance.

           

                   And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
                   Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?