Charles Mackay, who is best known for his Extraordinary Popular Delusions, also wrote about his visit the States — he was from London — in Life and Liberty in America (vol. 1, vol. 2), which Mencius Moldbug considers mandatory reading:
His ideas are typical of a moderate English liberal at the time, which of course makes him wonderfully reactionary for now. I can’t imagine a better host.My first response to Mackay’s travelogue is that the America he is writing about is, um, actually, alive. There is no sign of any tetrodotoxin. There are no zombie banks, zombie theaters, or even zombie politicians. If you absolutely have no time for anything beyond a sample, read Mackay’s chapter 3 — Broadway By Night.
What would you pay for a ticket to Broadway, 1859? Just to spend a night there? Imagine Mackay traveling to the New York of 2009. How is our Broadway by night? Not bad at all — by the standards of 2009. (And pretty damned good by the standards of 1979.)
I suspect he’d think Manhattan had been subjected to some kind of awful experiment in mass psychiatric medication. Everything has become grim, gray and slovenly. Not to mention that “life and property” are no longer anywhere near what Mackay would consider “very safe.” (Being a Londoner of the Victorian era, by “very safe” he means “completely safe” — the presence of a human predator on the streets being slightly more likely than that of an escaped leopard.)
And this is Broadway, then and now. Now, consider his description of St. Louis. What would Charles Mackay make of St. Louis today? What do you make of St. Louis today? (Or Detroit? Consider what this news crew found… in what was once America’s fourth largest city.) And then there’s Mackay’s New Orleans…
But there is another difference between 1859 and 2009: modern technology. We have it. They didn’t. So: imagine Mackay’s America, plus iPhones and satellites and nuclear power. Now you see the true measure of the gap. It’s a little like comparing America, 2009, to Belarus, 2009.