Joshua Mitchell on the "Age of Exhaustion"

Perhaps I just need to have a second cup of coffee this morning, but I thought this long essay by Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown on the "Age of Exhaustion” at the American Interest brilliantly captures much about our political and cultural moment—Liberalism (by which Mitchell means a good bit of modern American conservatism) and anti-Liberalism having run their course, we’re tired. Highly recommended with much to think about and contest throughout. A bit:

What Tocqueville understood over and above his contemporaries was that while the transition to democratic social conditions is always tumultuous, once they have settled in, a new sort of problem emerges: Citizens will lose faith in liberty and no longer labor to maintain and defend it. Instead, they will prefer a quiet, purportedly beneficent equality in servitude, a despotism that assures them that they have security and adolescent entertainment: Facebook, Twitter, never-ending video games, and the titillation of ever more mesmerizing gadgets. This delivers them from the specter of anxiety and the burden of freedom. The democratic age ends, neither with robust Liberals striving in a forever imperfect world, nor with defiant anti-Liberals striving to perfect the world, but rather with The Great Exhaustion. Striving, uncertainty, risk, labor, suffering, insult—these become too much for our fragile constitutions to bear. Above all, in the time of The Great Exhaustion, no one wants to “feel uncomfortable” and, so, we conspire to organize the world so that it is without duress or hardship. The 1 percent political and commercial classes are happy to oblige.