BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-05-18 We: Fukuyama: "Successful liberal societies have their own culture and understanding of the good life, even if that vision may be thinner.... Actual, real existing liberal societies have been built on top of non-liberal foundations…. That creates a tension… sometimes those cultural foundations are exclusionary…. Enough of a culture that people… are in a common endeavor…. But… that… shared core has to be tolerant and accessible..." Now I had always thought we had that in America: That our dominant culture was that we were all Pilgrims, or descended from Pilgrims—that we were, at our core, a people that had come to this land from many different places on a journey in search of opportunity and freedom to make a free, prosperous country of ample and open opportunity that would serve the world as a City Upon a Hill. Thus we should work diligently, so that, in the words of my ancestor John Winthrop: “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us… [and] he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England…” And we should especially: follow the Counsel of Micah, to do Justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God…. We must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly Affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, we must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in eache other, make others Conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our Commission and Community in the work…" Thus we are all children of the Pilgrims—some by birth, and others by election and adoption. And that is (or ought to be) true no matter which particular group of Pilgrims come to this land you are referencing at the moment. Now, today, Fox News and the Republican Party and the algorithms of the clickbait-seeking social media companies appear to have convinced a quarter of the population that that is not in fact who we are. And we have to get that back. And it will be hard...
"Why is there no democratic party infrastructure? Why is there only a network of semi-grifter consultants sending me panicked fundraising emails of which they get an excessive cut?". I just get twenty Dem fundraising emails a day. The panicked tone, the phony polls, and "personal" appeals are a huge turnoff.
Decidedly not an anti-woke nut, and indeed the awareness of structures of race and gender and class is very important, but unfortunately the quasi-religious identitarianism form is now a very prominent feature in elite institutions, and not in service to anything useful, but just the usual status games and backbiting. And it brooks no questions on whether what’s going on even makes sense. If you’ve avoided it, I’m jealous.
On the Democratic Party - I don’t know what it is now, if it ever was anything except fundraising. Both the activist and fundraising arms now have messages that remind me of the Republican Party’s constant moral panics and culture war nonsense of the late 90s and 00s; the activists don’t offer much in the way of community because they seemingly have 150 different emergencies we must all attend to immediately. “Watch a movie, when we could be smashing the fascist regime?” Not that they’re doing that either.
I do not know. I may simply be very lucky and living in a bubble. After all, economics is all about peeling back the surface layer and looking at where the material resources are going. Political science is all about persuasion and making alliances. Both are likely to be extremely skeptical of "quasi-religious identity Arianism"—that's an autocorrect error, but I am going to keep it—as, well, conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious grifts whose purpose is to block some from resources and coalitions to gain them and enhance others' abilities to do so.
But bear in mind such things can be good sources of countervailing power. One point of John
Scalzi's line that 'playing the game of life as a white male is playing it in "easy mode"' is that it is actually quite hard to do meritocratic ticket-punching if you are not a white male, so systems that require such ticket-punchiing to gain access to resources are highly likely to be discriminatory in effect even if not in intent.
Maybe things are very different in other departments and situations? In which turning the spotlight of resource-allocation and coalition-formation on yourselves is not a standard, instinctive move?
I understand your idea of the US as descending from ideas your ancestor articulated, but it also descends from a much darker set of ideas, namely those surrounding and underpinning fear and loathing of Native peoples and adherents to other religions. I think the right's rhetoric about replacement theory & Dems as commies and pedophiles follows similar rhetoric with different targets in Bradford & others.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, what are the "targets' In Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" that you see as in any way analogous to "the right's rhetoric about replacement theory & Dems as commies and pedophiles..."?
On the third hand, there is **literally** **nothing** that is more Pilgrimish than your insistence that America is irredeemably stained with Original Sin...
You're right about Winthrop. My point is that Bradford's rhetoric is much different, much more like what we see on the right. How cultural DNA is pretty complicated.
There's a good chance the book is being printed in China. All those printing shops built on the bedrock of lower Manhattan or across the river in New Jersey are upmarket housing. Even if the book is not being printed in China, there's a COVID related backlog on top of the normal multiple month print lead time. Even without globalization or China or COVID, publishing required booking press time months in advance. The trade is full of stories of long awaited "blockbusters" being delayed and missing their press slot and some last minute substitute work becoming a surprise bestseller.
"Why is there no democratic party infrastructure? Why is there only a network of semi-grifter consultants sending me panicked fundraising emails of which they get an excessive cut?". I just get twenty Dem fundraising emails a day. The panicked tone, the phony polls, and "personal" appeals are a huge turnoff.
Only twenty? Someone looking at my inbox would conclude that Nancy Pelosi or maybe Stacey Abrams was my best friend.
Decidedly not an anti-woke nut, and indeed the awareness of structures of race and gender and class is very important, but unfortunately the quasi-religious identitarianism form is now a very prominent feature in elite institutions, and not in service to anything useful, but just the usual status games and backbiting. And it brooks no questions on whether what’s going on even makes sense. If you’ve avoided it, I’m jealous.
On the Democratic Party - I don’t know what it is now, if it ever was anything except fundraising. Both the activist and fundraising arms now have messages that remind me of the Republican Party’s constant moral panics and culture war nonsense of the late 90s and 00s; the activists don’t offer much in the way of community because they seemingly have 150 different emergencies we must all attend to immediately. “Watch a movie, when we could be smashing the fascist regime?” Not that they’re doing that either.
I do not know. I may simply be very lucky and living in a bubble. After all, economics is all about peeling back the surface layer and looking at where the material resources are going. Political science is all about persuasion and making alliances. Both are likely to be extremely skeptical of "quasi-religious identity Arianism"—that's an autocorrect error, but I am going to keep it—as, well, conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious grifts whose purpose is to block some from resources and coalitions to gain them and enhance others' abilities to do so.
But bear in mind such things can be good sources of countervailing power. One point of John
Scalzi's line that 'playing the game of life as a white male is playing it in "easy mode"' is that it is actually quite hard to do meritocratic ticket-punching if you are not a white male, so systems that require such ticket-punchiing to gain access to resources are highly likely to be discriminatory in effect even if not in intent.
Maybe things are very different in other departments and situations? In which turning the spotlight of resource-allocation and coalition-formation on yourselves is not a standard, instinctive move?
I understand your idea of the US as descending from ideas your ancestor articulated, but it also descends from a much darker set of ideas, namely those surrounding and underpinning fear and loathing of Native peoples and adherents to other religions. I think the right's rhetoric about replacement theory & Dems as commies and pedophiles follows similar rhetoric with different targets in Bradford & others.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, what are the "targets' In Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" that you see as in any way analogous to "the right's rhetoric about replacement theory & Dems as commies and pedophiles..."?
On the third hand, there is **literally** **nothing** that is more Pilgrimish than your insistence that America is irredeemably stained with Original Sin...
You're right about Winthrop. My point is that Bradford's rhetoric is much different, much more like what we see on the right. How cultural DNA is pretty complicated.
One of the most disturbing things you wrote was this, “September 6”. C’mon dude, who’s in charge of printing, Gutenberg?
There's a good chance the book is being printed in China. All those printing shops built on the bedrock of lower Manhattan or across the river in New Jersey are upmarket housing. Even if the book is not being printed in China, there's a COVID related backlog on top of the normal multiple month print lead time. Even without globalization or China or COVID, publishing required booking press time months in advance. The trade is full of stories of long awaited "blockbusters" being delayed and missing their press slot and some last minute substitute work becoming a surprise bestseller.