Moving and Shaking
In furtherance of all the friendly criticisms of the ‘stay rooted/stay home’ ideal below I would point again to Tocqueville, who recognized the generational movement of Americans across and around their country was essential in maintaining an equilibrium of the fever that drives American politics and society. There is no escaping the importance of escape in politics; this applies, I think, to the inner motion of regimes just as much as to the founding that sets them in motion. The mythos, habit, principle, and problems of a country founded by ‘pilgrims’, like Rome and America, are all fated to be fundamentally different in character than those of an autocthonic people, like the Greeks, or, later, the rest of the Europeans. Britain alone was really able to break out of the box.
