Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 176

Modern Age

*

Summer 2017

willing to pay to watch for decades on end, the bad manners of
the wealthy, in Tocqueville's sense, drive us to distraction. . . . In a
warped way, we almost feel today about the merely rich how people felt in Tocqueville's time about the aristocrats. (128)

Yet Poulos's style, so effective in short pieces, becomes distracting at book length. The pop culture and personal narratives often
interrupt the best parts of The Art of Being Free. By the middle of
the book, the reader grows fearful of the next reference to cult
movies and edgy novels. Consider the examples here:
The wave [of warm reassurance that resulted from watching Zoolander] was more than a little tenebrous. As is often the case with
playing along, it seemed to yieldingly bleed into the realm of the
ominous. This is a film wherein Donald Trump intones that "without Derek Zoolander, male modeling wouldn't be what it is today."
This is a film that so closely parodies Bret Easton Ellis's late-1990s
models-and-terrorism nightmare, Glamorama, that it may or may
not have led, as Trump might have steered it, to an out-of-court
settlement. (351)

In passages like these, Poulos directs readers from Tocqueville and
toward topics that seem more interesting to him than to us-or
to Tocqueville. Can you guess the subject of this paragraph? It
is "play," a topic Tocqueville does not really address but which
Poulos struggles to reinterpret back into Democracy in America.
Why so many digressions? My hunch is that pop culture comparisons are how Poulos makes sense of Tocqueville and that he
assumes the reader will find them useful, too. They are also supposed to make Tocqueville relevant, but the references are dated,
obscure, or both. The effect is the opposite of what is intended.
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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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Contents
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