I don’t know why this annoys me so much, but it does. George Packer did a profile of OWS protester Ray Kachel and libertarian island guy (and early Facebook investor/now rich guy) Peter Thiel (via):
Half a century ago, Thiel would have been a Goldwater Republican, a churchgoer, and a paid-up member of a local business group. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to launch a fellowship program in order to induce young entrepreneurs to leave college. Education wasn’t one more “bubble” back then. Kachel would have been a Kennedy Democrat and perhaps, like his late father, an employee of the city of Seattle, living on a salary that could support a family of four. Neither would likely have felt a strong urge to escape from politics, like Thiel, or to join in the creation of a new community, like Kachel. But the past few decades have destabilized and eroded the institutional identities that used to bind Americans.
Half a century ago, Thiel, who is openly gay, would be stuck in the closet, subject to God knows what emotional, and possibly physical (given the barbarism of homophobia) torment. I think Thiel’s politics suck, but I am glad that he can live as openly gay man. That’s what I call progress. It’s strange to me that Andrew Sullivan heh-indeeds Packer without nothing this fact.
A commenter at Kevin Drum says of Ruth Marcus’s anti-obscentity jihad:
Back in my day teenagers weren’t uppity — and blacks sat in the back of the bus where they belonged, and women shut the hell up and did what they were supposed to, and those damned gays didn’t rub their sex lives in my face, and Jews didn’t join my clubs. That’s what you’re missing.
None of this has anything to do with reality — it’s a cri de coeur for past times when things were the way they were supposed to be before the damned dirty hippies destroyed the golden age. The fact that this makes zero sense if the complainer is black (Herman Cain?) female (Ruth Marcus), Jewish (half the “intellectuals” in the Republican party) doesn’t change it — people are morons, and the sorts of people who believe there once was a golden age are even more moronic.
Go back another generation or two past that and Nooners and Pat Buchanan — the undisputed king and queen of the awesomeness of the gold old days — didn’t join nice clubs either. My grandparents were among the earliest Irish-Catholic members of a fancy Cape Cod country club 50 or so years ago. (In another 20 years, their Jewish friends would be able to join.)
A lot of things have gone wrong the past fifty years, but a lot of things have gone right, especially with regard to discrimination. Moreover, a lot of the “dislocation” and “dysfunction” of contemporary American politics is caused by the right-wing response to the dirty hippies’ efforts to curtail ethnic/racial/gender/orientation discrimination.
schroddinger's cat
deleted
EconWatcher
Class struggle sure ain’t the engine of history in America. Cultural struggle is.
BGinCHI
The older generations in this country appear to be strapped to the capitalist engine with no idea how to free themselves. The generations younger than us (I was born in the late 60s) seem, in general, to be thinking outside that paradigm more than I would have expected.
Maybe they see what’s been passing for happiness among the McArdles of the world and are just tired of it. They want people to be treated fairly and they don’t want to give up everything or harm a bunch of other people just to be filthy rich. I think many of them, if not most, would sign up for a decent salary with good benefits if they could just do something that made them happy.
Or, shorter me, they see Mad Men and think it’s cool but hopelessly crazy, while their parents and grandparents wish it could be exactly that way again.
schroddinger's cat
This yearning for the past really leaves me cold. 50 years ago there was no internet, hence no Facebook and Thiel would not have made the big bucks and kept his nonsensical ideas to himself and not been considered a VSP.
Note: Can we consider George Packer to be VSP?
WereBear (itouch)
Hokay, Death of Unearned Privilege, line forms at the right.
I’m crying my eyes out, she said sarcastically.
schrodinger's cat
This yearning for the past really leaves me cold. 50 years ago there was no internet, hence no Facebook and Thiel would not have made the big bucks and kept his nonsensical ideas to himself and not been considered a VSP.
Note: Is George Packer a VSP?
AA+ Bonds
Very good point about Buchanan, nothing funnier than an Irish American xenophobe
MattF
@AA+ Bonds: FWIW, I’d say Buchanan is a fairly typical 1930’s Irish Catholic Fascist– What he’s doing here in the 2010’s is a fair question that I don’t know the answer to.
Villago Delenda Est
@AA+ Bonds:
I often say that my WASP ancestors (some forebearer of mine on my Mother’s side was a member of the Continental Congress) really fucked up by letting Buchanan’s ancestors into this country.
Don’t get me started on Tancredo’s grandparents…
BGinCHI
@MattF: Buchanan’s Irish roots are awfully shallow, if he even really has any. His name is a more common Scots name.
He’s hydroponic Irish, if anything.
kd bart
The good old days only existed on Hollywood back lots.
David in NY
Too bad it’s the wrong past they’re yearning for. The past I want is one in which one working-class guy made enough to support a family of four plus. Now it takes him, and his wife, to barely scrape by in many cases. Their standards of living may have risen a little, but for that, they have to work twice as hard (the women maybe more). If the wages of those single wage earners had risen the way the wealth of the 1% has, this society would not be constantly on edge the way it is.
ETA: To ward off attacks, the point is clearly not that things were better because a “guy” was earning that living wage, but that it was big enough to live on. No reason the “gal” couldn’t be earning it.
Benjamin Franklin
@AA+ Bonds:
I often wonder about Irish conservatives in the same way I wonder about conservative blacks. It seems anti-thetical to the genetic roots.
How did they receive the gene “F*** you, I’ve got mine”
Calming Influence
I read the New Yorker piece on Thiel yesterday, and came away with the feeling that Libertarianism is just a haven for socially stunted people who have been lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, and the coin flip went their way. Thiel comes off as someone with childish beliefs about the way the world works, politically naive, and hugely lacking in empathy.
Definitely one of the “if you’re not rich, blame yourself!” crowd.
Spaghetti Lee
Oh, God, what sanctimonious bullshit. So us dirty hippies with our eroding of institutional identities forced Thiel to wreak his objectivist garbage on the rest of us? I’d say the businessmen he worships had more to do with that particular erosion. The only reason the old Rockefellers and Carnegies and Vanderbilts didn’t build their own island was because there wasn’t the technology.
Waingro
Point taken on the increased tolerance and other social progress. That passage didn’t really annoy me, though- while there are more opportunities for minorities in theory, it’s not that much easier for minorities to advance economically and it sure as hell is a lot harder for prototypical Hardworking White People.
If unemployment continues to remain high and people continue being crushed by debt, there’s going to be a lot of fighting over the scraps and we’ll probably become a much less tolerant culture. Our elites will probably just retreat to their compounds and sick SWAT teams on us, so they don’t give a shit.
Calming Influence
I read the hard copy of No Death, No Taxes and didn’t realize it was behind the firewall online. Steal a copy from your dentist’s office.
Willard
The conservative golden age had a top marginal tax rate of 90%. Coincidence?
Hawes
Roy Cohn was a Republican…
Read the entire Packer piece. At the end, he sticks the knife into Libertarianism ever so gently and slowly until the blade is buried to the pommel.
Basically, Libertarians are rich fucks who never had to grow up. But it’s The New Yorker so he doesn’t say Fuck
BGinCHI
@Hawes: Packer may wander too far into the Village sometimes, but he’s not an idiot.
AA+ Bonds
@MattF:
Even goofier back then, hoss
Tom Q
@MattF: Yeah, my grandparents (long dead) came from the same mold. Obviously there were plenty of Irish Democrats in the Roosevelt-to-Kennedy coalition, but a not-insignificant percentage of the clan loved Fr. Coughlin and McCarthy.
And then, of course, hating on the blacks caused another bunch to switch sides. I remember once, when I was younger and more apt to be provocative, my grandmother was bitching about how the Irish were treated by the Brits, and I said, yeah, much like blacks were treated in America. My father said you could almost literally see the point fly right over her head.
maya
I think America’s Golden age has to have been around the time of the St. Louis World Fair – 1904.
Imagine getting all gussied up in corset and bustles, boater and spats, swinging on the porch swing, falling in love with the boy next door and all the excitement just preparing for opening day at the biggest event of your lifetime. A decade before all hell broke loose and nothing would ever be the same again.
Unfortunately, even in Hollywood, nobody actual sees the fair.
handsmile
@schrodinger’s cat: (#4)
As a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (2005), Packer would be regarded as a P(retty) Serious Person. His was the first book in which a somewhat prominent proponent of Shock ‘n Awe began to express public misgivings about the emerging clusterf*ck of post-war occupation there.
Such early apostasy from what was at the time the One True Faith in the Village will likely keep Packer from enjoying full dining and gym privileges in the VSP club. Also, the New Yorker itself may be a little too, shall we say, metrosexual for those confines. Even its editor, David Remnick, is rarely invited to appear among the Sunday morning bobbleheads. (Though to be fair, he is a favorite of Charlie Rose.)
Snark aside, I’m pleased that DougJ has front-paged Packer’s profile of Ray Kachel. I had recommended it yesterday in a comment on Anne Laurie’s “Occupy Boston” thread. It is a heartbreaking story, one that I think will resonate with many BJ readers. Very importantly as well, the story serves to explode the noxious stereotypes so beloved by the corporate media in its derisive coverage of the Occupy movement.
DougJ
@Hawes:
I’m with him on that, but I still think his 50-years-ago stuff was stupid.
shano
http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/occupation-“occupy”-israelification-american-domestic-security
Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”
“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”
BGinCHI
@DougJ: Doug, wasn’t his larger point that 50 years ago there would have been safety valves for people like these guys but now there aren’t? It leaves them with either the choice of giving up or turning to political action. That may be a reductive thesis, but I can see what he’s trying to get at. It works also for college students who earlier would have gotten jobs pretty easily, as well as working class folks who would have made good wages and thus had less incentive to become politicized.
schrodinger's cat
@handsmile: I did the read Assassin’s Gate and liked it, it confirmed many misgivings I had had about the Iraq misadventure.
RSA
Speaking of discrimination, I was just watching a Christmas movie on TV, a sentimental favorite from the 1940s, and for some reason this line jumped out at me:
Half a century ago, life in the U.S. was no picnic for more than a relatively small set of people. I suspect that people with names like McCain (Scottish… or Irish?), Bachmann (would she be a loyal American or a loyal German?), Santorum (is that the name of garlic eater or what?), Pawlenty (Polish jokes, anyone?) wouldn’t have even thought about running for President 50 years ago. (And what the hell is a Gringrich, anyway? Googling tells me it’s of French origin. Oh, the French…)
kd bart
@RSA:
Old Man Potter was Bedford Falls 1%.
Raven
@RSA: Um, the 40’s were, like, 70 years ago.
eemom
Anticipation…..anticipaaaaayaaation……is making me wait.
Good heavens, man, they made a Heinz commercial out of that song.
RSA
@kd bart: Exactly what I was thinking.
@Raven: Well, yeah, but my stomach was hurting me when I did the subtraction…
BBA
@RSA: As opposed to nice Anglo-Saxon names like “Eisenhower” and “Roosevelt”?
Raven
@RSA: Did you have some of my navy bean soup with kale?
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
What was the safety valve for gay people?
Raven
@DougJ: The closet?
LosGatosCA
Sullivan missed a salient fact?
You must be kidding.
When will WordPress start blocking the use of the word ‘Sullivan’ on this blog.
Please.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: Beard.
See Day, Doris.
/Point taken…I’m not defending nostalgia as a political theory, just trying to tease out GP’s point. Call me generous.
BGinCHI
@LosGatosCA: Right before the Rapture.
Which Doug thinks is a Blondie song posing as a religious experience.
Raven
@BGinCHI:
You go out at night and eat up bars where the people meet
Face to face, dance cheek to cheek
One to one, man to man
RSA
@BBA:
Yeah, basically I was over-generalizing. So much for my grand, unjustifiable theories.
SiubhanDuinne
@RSA:
Gastritis fucked up your calculator?
handsmile
@DougJ:
This thread on reaction formations to the social/demographic and economic permutations (the “dislocation and dysfunction”) of contemporary America prompts me to ask whether you’ve decided when the Balloon Juice Reading Club will take up Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind.
What I’ve read of it thus far would seem to offer insight into these issues of conservative repudiation of emancipatory and/or egalitarian initiatives.
LosGatosCA
@BGinChi
Also, McMegan, McArdle, etc. too?
BGinCHI
@LosGatosCA: Ooh, that’s a tempting thought.
I think beard work is a little too sophisticated for our li’l Megan.
ChrisNYC
Way to ignore the civil right movement! Which was not DFHs, by the way. And had SOMETHING to do with anti-discrimination. Just a bit, sort of tangentially. I am almost certain that discrimination was in there SOMEWHERE. Anyway, they were probly just glomming on to DFHs, MLK and Abernathy and the rest.
Andrew
@
:
Union membership was also three times higher than it is today, which might explain why a father could raise a family of four on one salary in the 1950s. And the government handed out free college educations and virtually free home ownership to WWII veterans.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
Ha!
DougJ
@handsmile:
Yes, we will do it for the book club!
Interrobang
@shano: That’s hilarious, considering that I was just in Israel, and on the way back to Soviet Canuckistan, I had to connect through Philadelphia, and I had a fuck of a lot more trouble getting through airport security in Philly than I did in Tel Aviv. Y’all have a problem, folks, and it ain’t the Israelis.
I see more military personnel on an average day in my crummy little Canadian tank-town than I did in a week in Jerusalem, too.
Also, Ben Gurion airport has much of its “waste” space reinvented as citrus groves, which is a rough model every airport in every ostensibly-civilised country should be using, for environmental and aesthetic reasons.
For what it’s worth, I was in Israel on a business trip, meeting my actual boss. The world is a weird place.
burnspbesq
@eemom:
You’re dating yourself, kiddo. I’m willing to bet that 80 percent of the regular commenters weren’t alive when Carly Simon released that record, and 40 percent will react by saying “Carly who?”
I think I still have my copy in the storage space.
dSmith
“As opposed to nice Anglo-Saxon names like “Eisenhower” and “Roosevelt”?”
Eisenhower is a German name, Roosevelt is Dutch. They can both be categorized as “Anglo-Saxon”
Rob
50 years ago was when Ayn Rand was leading around a bunch of disciples like Greenspan.
Chet
Gee, our ol’ LaSalle ran great!
Jan Stranick
Day,Doris? How do we inquire?
Tehanu
@BGinCHI:
Speak for yourself. I’m in their parents’ generation (a Boomer) and I can’t fucking STAND to watch Mad Men because I remember exactly what it was like in the late 1950s – early 1960s: it sucked donkey balls. I’d rather die than go back to the way it was then.
Cain
@kd bart:
Ever notice how in all these christmas movies, like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Christmas Carol” the douche in the movie is always the banker?
Steve M.
Half a century ago, Thiel might have been Marvin Liebman.
RP
This post seems a little unfair. I thought Packer was basically saying that 50 years ago Thiel would have been more comfortable remaining in the GOP because the party hadn’t gone batsh*t insane and Kachel would have had a comfortable middle class existence because the economy was better and wealth was more evenly distributed. Those don’t seem like controversial arguments for this site.
IrishGirl
DougJ, My own Irish Catholic g-g-g-grandfather immigrated ended up in Mississippi before the Civil War. The pressure on him to fit in and be like everyone else was tremendous. He did convert and marry the daughter of a Baptist preacher. When the war broke out he fought for the South. While I do believe he had true convictions motivating him, I know that he also felt tremendous pressure to “act” like everyone else and he worked very hard to fit into “respectable” society. People who are ignorant of history just don’t understand that the Irish were treated pretty bad when they first arrived and it didn’t let up until they melted into or overtook their own areas. Some of the names there were called:
Bog-Trotter
Leprechaun
Narrow Back
Paddy
Pogue
Potato Head
Shant
Spudn*gger or Spudf*cker (also White N*gger)
How soon we forget.