One Cosmos has written a thought-provoking essay titled The Pathetic Last Children of Nietzsche’s Pitiable Last Men. The more you read, the more you are pulled in. A taste:

A while back, I wrote a post entitled Divorce American Style, discussing how the American political system historically bifurcated into two parties more or less mirroring the archetypal maternal and paternal spheres. As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father–that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they. …

The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance–compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general).

Absolutely superb writing. The author elequently expresses that which I grapple to formulate into words (as I am one who has lived through some of the history that is addressed in the post).

(“Jimmy Carter’s gynocracy” — heh!)

Read the comments as well.

Hat tip to Dr. Sanity, whose post has some other excellent links.