American Stoicism and the Benedict Option

Alexis de Tocqueville explained that the two indigenous countercultures in America were New England Puritanical Christianity and the Southern aristocracy. The Puritans, in a way, made a contribution to American magnanimity by defending Sunday as a day of restful leisure, reminding the busy Americans that they were born for more than a merely material existence as beings with a high, singular, and more than merely biological destiny. Tocqueville also said that the Southerners, despite the monstrous injustice of race-based slavery, had the virtues and vices of any aristocracy. He didn't speculate about the American future in light of that fact, assuming that the inevitable disappearance of the slave-based society would lead to the assimilation of the South into the universalism of middle-class thought and morality.