The Resumption of History: Part 2 — The Age of Anxiety
by Carlo Graziani
Part 1, The Davos Consensus, and its Discontents ended like this:
How did we get from the “triumph” of 1991 to this? How do we explain the cancerous metastasis represented by this challenge to the neo-liberal order?
I have a candidate explanation: anxiety.
Beneath The Dormant Volcano
The thing is, below the notice of the Davos elites, all over the world, there were a lot of people for whom getting smart was not a ticket to getting rich. In the developing world there continued to be plenty of conflicts both above and below the threshold of Western media notice, affecting the hardscrabble lives of billions. And even beyond that old news, the shiny new world order brought strange, disturbing, destabilizing novelties.
Sudden market crashes due to instabilities caused by the replacement of human traders by computers wiped out many small nest eggs; global currency crashes plunged entire tiers of nations encompassing hundreds of millions of people into crisis for no reason intelligible to the immediate victims (including citizens of Russia in 1998, a particularly delicate time in post-Soviet politics).
An imbecilic war of choice by the US destabilized the Middle East by wiping out a Westernizing Arab Nationalist movement over 40 years in the making. In this context, “The West” has a longer-term historical sense than its 20th Century meaning: it is the cultural ecumene that succeeded “Christendom”, and is viewed by Islamists as such. In this sense Saddam Hussein was our (i.e. Westernizing) dickhead, as was Qaddafi, as were Assad pere, Sadat, Nasser, Arafat, et alia. They may have been Marxists, but Marx was, after all, a Western philosopher in the same sense. All of them looked back for inspiration to Kemal Ataturk, the pioneering Westernizing nationalist Turkish reformer (the destruction of whose modernizing works is the life project of Recep Erdogan, who has more than one iron in the fire in this narrative).
This is not hindsight: any half-lettered day laborer in the Sudan could have told you in 2002 that Sadam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden loathed each other far more viscerally than either despised George Bush, but apparently this fact passed beneath the notice of the US National Security Council. When the George W. Bush declared war on “evil” characters such as Hussein using language straight out of a Justice League comic-book morality tale, the effect was merely to discredit and destroy Arab nationalism, leaving the field open to medieval-minded Islamist dead-enders, the only remaining viable region-wide political alternative in the Middle East. This effectively turned the region into an roiling, uncontrollable, political seismic zone. It was the ultimate geopolitical own-goal.
A financial crisis straight out of 1929 wiped tens of trillions of dollars of small-investor wealth off the books all over the world, although oddly the people intermediating those transactions did OK. Weird new global pandemics, spread by frenetic new global travel patterns before COVID-19 (Avian flu, Ebola, Swine Flu, SARS-CoV-1) suddenly stalked the world. New, really new, weird, really weird weather, made large parts of the densely-inhabited world much harder to live in. And drove more desperate people to emigration, to competition, and to more conflict. Southern hemisphere nations that could not act as magnets for global outflows of jobs acted instead as sources for global inflows of migrants heading for the Northern hemishpere, where they were distinctly unwelcome.
Western Europe, long accustomed to scolding the US for its history of racial prejudice when such reproofs merely took the form of celebrating African-American cultural and political icons, suddenly discovered an ethnic and racial mean streak of its own, as it found itself struggling to assimilate hundreds of thousands, then millions of North African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing war zones, famines, or simply poverty too abject to credit. The “choice” between being forced to see those people sleeping on streets and in train stations or sinking their teeming cockleshell boats at sea produced some of the ugliest political discourse I ever hope to hear in my lifetime.
All of this by way of saying, for many, many people, life was not only not getting more comfortable, it was getting weirder, more alarming, more anxious.
And that, I think, is the common thread. Anxiety. People, all over the world, saw a lot of change that they didn’t have any control over, that they didn’t like, that in many cases ran right over them, and that they wanted stopped and reversed, somehow. And their leaders, in most cases, were feeding them bullshit happy-talk about about how everything was getting better.
Well, this is the kind of political tinder that evokes demagogues. It’s not possible to even be a normal politician when people get this angry and scared. And if you are the kind of politician who knows how to surf this kind of sentiment, it is child’s play to turn fear into anger, anger into hate, and hate into power. Like flies drawn to excrement, those demagogues showed up for work and promptly ate the lunches of the politicians who should have been carrying the neo-liberal gospel to further triumphs.
In the US, the dynamic began manifesting itself with the accelerating growth of wealth and income inequality, documented brilliantly by Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, further spurred by the inevitable, but utterly mismanaged economic dislocations driven by globalizing outflows of jobs—not discussed in polite company at Davos—compounded by the happy-talk of the elite celebrating trade deals such as NAFTA that were obviously—obviously—immediately immiserating to millions who saw middle-class status slipping away. And, of course, the inflow of migrants from the South, always a constant flow in the US, was growing, circumventing legal immigration limits, often enough facilitated by traffickers in ways that allowed it to be coupled in the public mind with crime, in addition to (less logically, but understandably) those disappearing jobs.
Following which, we have a couple of market panics driven by inscrutable forces, the 9/11 clusterfuck, and the 2009 financial crisis.
In parallel, populist spoilers on the right (Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot) and on the left (Ralph Nader) played as a chorus to Newt Gingrich’s nihilistic “bomb-throwing” republicanism, displacing Jack Kemp/Bob Dole “Intellectual” (really!) Republicanism as the template for the Republican demagoguery to follow: The Karl Rovian Imagineering, the Fox Empire enablers, and the PAC-men billionaires. All acting in cynical, demagogic, anxiety-manipulating maneuvering schemes to gain and maintain power.
It would actually be funny, if it weren’t so deeply tragic: Imagine the silly looks on the faces of all those entitled rich guys who thought they were in control of the GOP, and running it as a finely-tuned engine for stoking rube-rage and converting it into power and wealth, when it suddenly dawned on them that Trump and his army of trailer-park yahoos had them all naked, spread-eagled, and tied to a barrel, as he took control of the party that they had primed for him by whipping up all that hate, simply because he realized before anyone else that you don’t need a dog whistle if you’re prepared to bellow all the ugly parts at the top of your lungs. Kind of like those German oligarchs in the 1932 election, who thought those ridiculous idiotic Nazi street brawlers were useful, but not serious, and anyway they were under control.
I realize how schematic the above account is. I know that it leaves out the America’s shabby treatment of Blacks and the concomitant manipulation of racism, and also gives no account of the Religious Right, the culture wars, the Paranoid Style in American Politics, and other factors that are dispiritingly constant factors in US social history going back to the age of Andrew Jackson, if not earlier.
My point is that in prosperous times the toxic effects of those pathologies of American politics are containable. In anxious times they are decidedly not.
So that’s where we stood, in the United States. By 2016, it had come to Trump. To the extent that the US had ever upheld ideals that the rest of the world aspired to emulate, it was beginning to appear that those ideals, whatever they were, were destined for a trip through the shredder. The US had just elected President a figure that the rest of the world would have no trouble recognizing as an oligarch.
And then, to add insult to injury, our own kids (who, just as we did as adolescents, thought that history began on the day they started paying attention to news) blamed us for screwing up the world because we were “capitalists”, and because “free enterprise is stupid” (or “racist”, or “transphobic”, or whatever) and because “capitalism is destroying the environment”.
And how do you even retrieve a political discussion that’s so hopelessly confused? How did we allow it to get so muddled? Why did we allow ourselves to be intellectually cornered into defending capitalism, as if that was the point, as if free enterprise were the aspect of our societies that, if someone were to place limits on it, we would say “no, sorry, now our societies are not worth defending after all”? What the hell happened to our actual political values?
Tomorrow: Of Justice and Power
All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History
SpaceUnit
Noam Chomsky, is that you?
Kropacetic
We can start by reclaiming all the words the Republicans have tortured out of recognition; liberal, socialist, conservative, CRT, et c.
I think too many people don’t even have a grasp on political ideology outside the party system. That’s a problem.
Carlo Graziani
@SpaceUnit: Hah! No.
You probably think that because this is the low point of an extended narrative. It actually gets a bit more optimistic from here.
Ishiyama
This is an interesting window into what has happened over my lifetime. I remember when a four year college was affordable to any youth who had a summer job (thanks to Abe Lincoln’s land grant colleges). Breaking that link in the ladder to climb in social rank and replacing it with debt was a crime, and not the least of them, that lead us to this pass. The War on Drugs and government drug-testing also kept a lot of very bright, innovative thinkers from ever taking positions in government, or being taken seriously as citizens at all. I could go on and on with my own opinions, but I have nothing to back them up (that I care to mention).
Carlo Graziani
@Ishiyama: I’d actually value even periferal takes.
Omnes Omnibus
It’s funny because a while back a well respected comment here described himself as a capitalist as his political ideology (I may be generalizing a bit). After that, I thought about it and capitalism actually pretty damned low on my list. Liberal democracy is my go to. If we have that, the other things will come. I realize that can put me in a bit of a Unitarian Jihad category, but so be it.
SpaceUnit
@Kropacetic:
This is one of my pet peeves. People can’t wait to argue about some abstraction such as socialism without bothering to define what they mean by it. To one person it’s the Russian Revolution. To the other it’s the local rec center and sewage plant.
Poe Larity
Trump was just rebranded Buchanan from 1992. It just took 24 years.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropacetic: Hard to do, but worthwhile.
Carlo Graziani
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s not a “jihad” at all. What you’re sensing is, in my view, the need to disentangle the same mess that I’ve also been attempting to disentangle for years. Tomorrow I’m going to set out how it finally started to make sense to me, at least.
Baud
@SpaceUnit:
Agreed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Carlo Graziani: I think you may not be familiar with the Unitarian Jihad.
Omnes Omnibus
@SpaceUnit: Define peeve.
Rand Careaga
I take some solace—scant, admittedly—that I may never have to listen to a US President piously proclaim (as even Obama, who was obviously smart enough to know better, did) that “America’s best days are yet to come.” There is room for disagreement as to when those “best days” might have been, depending on one’s age, ethnicity and class, but it is clear that they’re receding in history and memory, and that the rest of the century here is going to look a lot more like Blade Runner than The Jetsons. It already does.
Baud
@Rand Careaga:
You might want to stop listening to US presidents then. They will never stop saying it.
David Collier-Brown
Admittedly, my brain hurts, but this speaks to the problem that the American Dream (and the Canadian, you understand) had died: if you and they work hard, your children won’t do better that you did…
Ishiyama
@Carlo Graziani: All the smart kids in my high school took LSD and it became a thing for the jocks, too. I was close to the Marijuana legalization movement for years in my home town, a Democratic stronghold. A sizeable fraction of the reliable Democratic voting public were pot smokers, and would turn out in heavy numbers to support Democratic candidates. (In a practical demonstration, one candidate in a three way race for the office of county prosecutor pulled 8% of the vote on a platform calling for a moratorium on all marijuana prosecutions.)
While some Democratic party officials made nice with individual legalization advocates, in the legislature there was always bipartisan support for the War on Drugs. Not one voice was ever raised to defend the privacy and freedom of hippies. There is little doubt in my mind that the reason Ralph Nader was able to pull votes away from Al Gore was, more than anything else, his support for marijuana legalization. Pot smokers across the country were seething mad at the Clinton administration for its drug law enforcement. That’s what I saw around me, fwiw.
Carlo Graziani
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re right. You got me there.
Reminds me of the joke: “What do you get when you interbreed a KKK member with a Unitarian?”
“Someone who burns a giant question mark on your lawn.”
Baud
@Ishiyama:
There’s always going to be something.
Ksmiami
I actually think the advent of Social Media has accelerated a breakdown in norms and politesse- and it’s amplified /organized the voices and perceived importance of a sizable group of nuts. The “bored lumpenbourgeoisie” as Nichols calls them. The ones who wax nostalgic for the bad old days from their oversized homes with fast wifi and the latest iPhones.
Matt McIrvin
Because of the Cold War, of course (and its end). For several decades the great illiberal Enemy was officially Communist, so we had to be the opposite of that.
Matt McIrvin
@Rand Careaga: No politician who wants to win an election is going to tell you you’re fucked forever and there’s nothing we can do.
Well, OK, maybe Richard Lamm. That was a while ago.
Carlo Graziani
@Matt McIrvin: Well, yes. But, as I tried to point out yesterday, in principle we had a choice. We might have declared “victory” over that enemy in virtue of our democratic principles. Instead, we did so on the basis of “capitalism”.
painedumonde
Remember there was a large amount of persons only considered three fifths of a vote at the very beginning – it was in the foundation. Political values themselves n are stories, myths we tell about ourselves. It is by our fruit that ye shall know us.
gene108
The turning point for Turkey is when they were denied EU membership, because the Turks weren’t “European enough” for the EU, i.e. poorer than Western European nations, and Muslim.
Matt McIrvin
@Carlo Graziani: I recall the US during the unipolar moment actually doing a lot of lecturing abroad about democracy and human rights and mostly getting slapped down as hypocritical. But nobody thought we were hypocrites about capitalism.
Cameron
https://youtu.be/O57mcVUd4Yg
CaseyL
Thank you for putting into clear, cogent writing a lot of thoughts which have been bouncing around my head. Most painfully, the realization that tens of millions of people in the US had their savings wiped out and their lives upended, with little actual help or recovery, in 2008-2009.
I do wonder how many of them started out as reasonable people, even as responsible voters, who then went down the rabbit hole of hatred and conspiracy, after losing everything they had worked for. (Or their kids, who saw it all up close, with even less understanding of the hows and whys.)
Thank you also for putting Bush II’s Excellent Iraqi Adventure in its proper perspective, as a globally destructive and thoughtless project. The Republican fuckers did the same thing in Iraq they did in the former USSR: show up with their “free enterprise” happytalk, which didn’t fit the culture at all, and sat back as the country descended into savagery. The result of that godawful spree will reverberate for generations – and I’m not at all surprised that an awful lot of the non-Western world doesn’t trust the US as far as they could throw us.
New Deal democrat
I’ll keep this comment as brief as I can.
Synthesizing your posts from yesterday and today,
1. The “Davos consensus” was simply Norman Angell’s “Grand Illusion” one century later; I.e., countries that engage in free trade under capitalism will never make war on one another, because it is economically “irrational.” Paul Krugman wrote last week that free trade freed authoritarians to pursue their agendas. Ironically, when I went looking for that, I found an amazingly prescient column of his from 2008 that argued that Putin’s invasion of Georgia may have marked the beginning of the end of globalism. I quoted it at length and discussed it here:
https://bonddad.blogspot.com/2022/04/paul-krugman-on-great-illusion-of.html
2. Free trade produces losers. And after decades of having it screamed at them, some economists like Brad DeLong have accepted that critique, and finally understand that those losses may be both deep and long-lasting. Which brings us to
3. Immigrants. In every country where fascism is making a comeback, the most pervasive target is immigrants. Immigrants are polluting the culture, and taking away the natives’ jobs. In the case of the US, something like 15% of all residents are foreign born, a huge historical percentage. Notably, this is the South’s first big wave of immigration in the past 300 years.
As I wrote a month ago, Ukraine reminds me historically of the Spanish Civil War, a dress rehearsal for what is to come.
Rand Careaga
@David Collier-Brown:
Yup. Upward mobility was practically a civic religion in the fifties and sixties. The guy on the factory floor could entertain some hope that his sons (women, recall, hadn’t made noticeable penetration of the broader workforce) would work in the front office. The office manager might see his sons make it to the professions.
As a child of that era I’d kinda internalized that worldview, and I think I was twenty-one by the time the first oil embargo made me realize that the party might not go on forever. As a friend of mine was to observe in the mid-eighties (we were talking about how our generation had fallen short measured against its extravagant rhetoric of former years), “People have started to realize that there’s not going to be a place at the table for everyone, that some are going to get the shit end of the stick, and they’re like, not me, boy.”
Carlo Graziani
I just want to say this one more time. This is the low point of this narrative.
I am, despite being essentially a sarcastic dickhead, disposed towards an essentially optimistic long-term outlook. This bummer of an episode is really a waystation, dictated by the necessary periodization of this essay.
So before this comment thread heads too deep into hairshirt territory, please keep in mind that while self-criticism is the essential ingredient for growth, if prosecuted single-mindedly it can constitute a pathology in its own right.
L85NJGT
@Baud:
Life is shit, and we suck.
baud2024!
tybee
@Omnes Omnibus: Unitarian Jihad
got a bumper sticker with that?
Raven
Where are they getting all this ammo if there is such a shortage?
Rand Careaga
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ve long thought that it’s no coincidence that the viciousness of US public life ramped up noticeably after the Sovs disappeared. All of a sudden we were obliged to consume domestically much of the rhetorical poison that the polity had formerly produced for export: a sort of metabolic imbalance, so to say.
Raven
@tybee: catchin any?
Omnes Omnibus
@Carlo Graziani: There is a tendency among online liberals to find the low point and begin digging. Against this tendency, the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Xavier
“Erich Fromm very accurately describes preconditions for autocracy in Escape From Freedom. He wrote in the late 1930s and looked at extreme economic anxiety and mass displacement. Extreme economic anxiety related not only to hyperinflation in Germany but more broadly to a changing world, a world in which it was impossible for people to imagine who they’ll be and how they’ll live some years from now, or where their children will be. Those are conditions that are very much present in many parts of the world. There are kinds of societies and governments that try to address anxieties, and there are kinds that don’t. We definitely have the kind that doesn’t. I think that’s a culture-wide failure that isn’t concentrated on the right.” (From an interview with Masha Gessen)
Omnes Omnibus
@tybee: I don’t do bumper stickers.
Mike E
@Ishiyama: I resemble your remark, graduated in ’85 with $2,500 in school debt ($6,619.23 in today’s money) because I did an internship my last semester and had to quit my 3-year job pushing files for Phila public defender. Those were heady times, when grants and financial aid could put you through 4 years of college…but of course that sombitch Reagan had to sh¡t all over us unwashed proles and called it “trickle down”, heh.
Another Scott
I’m not sure which side of the sarcasm line you’re at with the obviously.
We’re on the same page that economies change. Jobs are being created and destroyed all the time, either gradually, or with huge sudden disruptions. Sensible governments try to make sure that more good jobs are being created than destroyed.
I understand why you’re not giving cites to your assertions and conclusions, but NAFTA (and TPP and all the rest) have good sides and bad sides.
Warton:
(Emphasis added.)
I get where you’re coming from, but we have to look at the alternatives. Would Levi’s and West Point-Pepperell still be making clothing and towels in the US in 2022 without NAFTA? Since they’re making their stuff in SE Asia and elsewhere, it’s hard to see that NAFTA is the cause for those jobs being gone. Similarly with many other industries. Car-making is over 100 years old. Textiles even older. Mining even older. It’s silliness to think that developing countries won’t eventually undercut US prices on these things. The US economy has to keep moving forward to create new industries and products, and not subsidize buggy whips and 12 mpg pickups. And serving as a market for developing countries to sell their stuff helps them become more prosperous, and with luck peaceful, and as a place that will buy our stuff. It was ever thus.
Of course, as you say, government policies guide the way the economy develops. Dean Baker reminds us that we have the economy we do because of the laws and taxes and patents and financing systems that exist. (As you say, there’s nothing “free” about the “free market”.) “Retraining” has a bad rap, and deservedly so, but training and making it possible for people to change careers – or retire before they’re broken down – is important and pays for itself. Yes, too many of the elites have twisted legislatures for favored treatment and that’s dangerous for the economy and for civil society.
/ My rambles for this evening.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cheez Whiz
Just want to say you have formed the argument I have been chewing on for at least 10 years, far more clear and distinct than I ever could. I agree things are not hopeless, but it’s going to get uglier before it can get better.
kindness
And all the while the media elite, the Village Elders, kept tut tutting those who saw what was happening, while patting themselves on the back for being important peoples. They ate strawberries and creme and went to Davos and still thought they could move the needle as they please. But they can’t. They’ve been played too and refuse to admit it. The genie is out of the bottle and doesn’t want to go back. This is going to get a lot worse before it get’s better.
Carlo Graziani
@Xavier: Excellent reference! Thank you!
persistentillusion
@Omnes Omnibus: I knew it existed, but had never read it (aloud, to much household amusement) in its entirety. I, sir, am in your debt.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Nice job Carlo, I’m interested in this series.
A few thoughts
First, you’ve done a nice job of mentioning sources of anxiety. But I think there was another factor at work at the same time. While millions of people faced lives which became worse during the era of Davos, there were also at the same time people who became more comfortable – not as the super-rich, but as First World middle class people who for the first time in their lives were not threatened with the possibility of extinction in a super power conflict which went nuclear. If you were lucky enough to be born into this demographic, post 1991 the world seemed like a safer place, with less in the way of existential threats.
When people do not feel threatened in an existential way, they tend to become less cautious, less prudent, and less serious in making their choices.
This is very evident in the voting patterns in American elections. When the American middle class feels like maybe shit is getting real, they vote for somebody serious to clean up the mess and keep chaos at bay. When they feel comfortable, what we get is boredom, narcissism, and for those who are truly comfortable and who don’t feel personally exposed to the consequences of bad collective decision making: nihilism.
These things: boredom, narcissism and nihilism are First World luxuries. They can only be enjoyed by people so comfortably sheltered from the bad things in life and threats in the world that they can Fuck Around, without having to Find Out at a personal level (doing so is somebody else’s burden).
The Jan 6th conspirators fit this profile to a T. They were comfortable, sheltered, deeply unserious people acting like malicious, idiotic children playing with flamethrowers and hand grenades and expecting somebody else to pay the price if things go badly. But they are merely the sharp edge of a larger and more disturbing trend of willful ignorance, sheltered stupidity and malicious vandalism that penetrates deeply into the American electorate. Nor is this feckless mood the exclusive property of the Right (see for example Rose Twitter). And all of this got much worse once we thought that we no longer faced a potentially deadly threat from an adversary who with the push of a few buttons could turn every single one of us into radioactive ash.
I don’t think that timing is a coincidence.
For another look at how reckless and irresponsible people can talk and act when they feel truly comfortable and sheltered, I rec Modris Ekstein’s book The Rites of Spring which documents the mood of nihilism which was often to be found in European cultural elites during the period immediately prior to the outbreak of the First World War. There are I think many parallels to be found in American culture today.
gene108
@Rand Careaga:
I’m a pessimist by nature, but every generation has had its “the best days are gone, and will never return” sentiment.
Some periods of time it’s more prolific than others. I think the 1970’s, and into the early 1980’s had a strong “best days are gone” vibe.
The 1990’s was a period of optimism. We ran a budget surplus, we weren’t in any major wars, unemployment was low, and for the first time in a generation wages for lower income folks was rising. Then Bush, Jr. slithered his way into the White House, and and as “the Onion” so accurately predicted, three days before his inauguration, would make sure “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over”.
We’ve just started clearing out and catching up with whatever’s salvageable after the Bush, Jr. years*, but because of COVID-19 we’re facing a major stressor on society in what would ordinarily be a time of prosperity.
TL;DR: Optimism and pessimism in society can go through cycles. I think COVID has helped put us on a pessimistic cycle.
*I think the difference between Bush and Trump is:
Bush, Jr. did some spiritual harm to the well being of the United States, but significant material harm, both tangibly and intangibly. Tangibly the crappy recovery from the Dot Com bust, and then the Great Recession, plus the pointless tax cuts hurt the fiscal position of this nation and the financial position of Americans. Intangible harm with the invasion of Iraq, torture, and starting a process to ignore international institutions, like the U.N. or other multilateral treaties, like the Kyoto Protocols. ETA: Bush scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty early in to work on his top security issue, which was a missile defense system.
Trump, on the other hand, did significant damage to the spirit of America and what we are as a nation, while only some harm to the material well being, before COVID with the tax cut for rich fuckwads. After COVID the material harm he did increased a lot.
Omnes Omnibus
@kindness: To be fair, there is some good skiing to be had at Davos. But hella overpriced bars. Finding a good place to drink without running into Eurotrash was a bitch.
Villago Delenda Est
@Poe Larity:
I recall when Comedy Central covered the 1992 GQp convention, and Al Franken called the election for Clinton in the middle of Pat Buchanan’s “red meat” speech that was clearly cribbed from one of the Partei rallies in 30s Germany.
Omnes Omnibus
@persistentillusion:
I have done something of value today. Good.
WaterGirl
@Carlo Graziani:
I laughed out loud.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ksmiami:
The anonymity, and the reach, of the Internet is very corrosive to polity.
tybee
@Raven:
Haven’t been fishing in a bit but we’ve caught several bushels of oysters recently. One of the chirrens caught a snook in a brackish lagoon out here on the islands in december and then caught another in february. DNR says they don’t live this far north.
Another Scott
@gene108: +1
Oh, man, yes. The mid-to-late 1960s were a kind of golden age for
death-trapinteresting, fun, powerful cars. By the mid-late 1970s American cars were junk – ugly, under-powered, heavy, crappy things. It was horrible. And gas went from being dirt cheap to being too expensive!Plus, NASA was gutted after the last moon landings.
There were some bright spots, but they were very hard to find.
Yes, there’s always a current in the stream of America that things are getting worse and will never be better again. I don’t believe it. We have to keep pushing forward.
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Quark, on DS9, summed this entire anxiety thing up pretty well: “Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people… will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don’t believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.”
WaterGirl
@Carlo Graziani: I don’t find this part depressing or discouraging, probably because it’s a relief to have the puzzle pieces finally fit together.
*of course, i have read the other 3 parts so that may have something to do with it, too. :-)
WaterGirl
@Raven: Who is they? Guessing Ukraine?
Carlo Graziani
@Another Scott: Thanks, Scott. I do agree that in the long term those trade deals were economic wins overall. But the issue remains: to whom did those benefits accrue, and from whom did those costs accumulate?
The benefits of those trade deals, which were undoubtedly real, were long-term, and diffused. The costs were immediate, and obvious. And there was no well-thought out government efforts to soften those costs, beyond SNL-worthy pronouncements about retraining steelworkers as PC repair persons, or other similar inanities. There was simply no plan, and no plan to make a plan, and no sense of urgency that such a meta-plan might even be necessary. In the Clinton years, the presumption was that this stuff would all take care of itself.
This is the blindness characteristic of that era. Mind you, I am not claiming that I myself was exempt from it. I can see it now.
Rand Careaga
@gene108:
Sure. I try to remember that the late sixties, which I personally found an exciting time, must have seemed to my parents as though the world was coming to an end. I try to remind myself not to go all eschatological on people when our present plight comes up in conversation. My wife is thoroughly tired of hearing me tell her that we’re never coming back from the damage Trump has wrought. But while I hope I’m wrong about 2024, I’m fairly sure that Republican legislatures will overrule the popular vote and send their own electors wherever necessary to secure the decision in the EC, and it’s hard to see how the wheels don’t come off the country after that.
It may be that some broad sunlit upland awaits us, but I get a strong “gonna get worse before it gets better” from the observable trends, and I’m guessing that I don’t live to see the “gets better” part.
Auntie Anne
I just want to thank you for writing this series. I seldom comment, mostly because it takes me so darn long to think through what I’ve read. But your take seems right on some instinctual level, so I want to go ahead and thank you now while I continue to think about what you’ve written. And I look forward to the next installment.
Carlo Graziani
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I do have a specific take on January 6, but it is rather different from yours. It will feature rather prominently on Thursday’s installment. We should compare notes then.
catclub
@Poe Larity:
Not JUST, he is also rich – far richer certainly than Buchanan. Too many rubes see him as a model rich man tycoon ala The Apprentice..
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Villago Delenda Est:
But in our (American) case, some of the worst is coming from people who have not been deprived, have not had to give up their creature comforts. How many times has the idea of “economic anxiety” as a political driving force been skewered on this blog for the mendacious crap that it is?
This is not to say that economic anxiety does not exist, that nobody is deprived. The fruits of our era of globalization were not shared out equally or anything even remotely close to it. When we insultingly describe Putin’s Russia as a kleptocracy, it is only by degrees that we are not also describing our own society.
But.
There is so much more to it than that. That explanation may work at a mass level, but its explanatory power starts to evaporate when you look at individuals, in my humble opinion.
And the sheer gleeful recklessness, irresponsibility, cynicism and nihilism of people in our society who have more than their fair share of leverage and agency (those working in the news media for example) is really hard to overlook.
gene108
@Mike E:
When I went to college from 1992-1996, instate tuition in a North Carolina four year college was around $750-$800 per semester, plus books, fees, and cost of living. You could still pay your way through college, with a student loan of a few thousand dollars.
Now, depending on the NC university, I instate tuition can be as high as $9,000 per semester.
I wish our university employed commenters could posit their theories on why tuition has gone so high, so fast.
Matt McIrvin
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I have honestly been feeling the nihilism a lot lately. Because clearly nihilism WINS and caring LOSES. How can we get some of that? Do we need to become terrorists? Heedless liars? Endorse running over our political opponents with trucks? It seems to be working for the other guys.
The problem is, doing this shit in the name of liberalism is incoherent whereas doing it in the name of being an ignoramus and a bully makes perfect sense.
Rand Careaga
@Another Scott:
You neglected to mention some of the regrettable decisions made in apparel and grooming. Also, kitchen appliances in “avocado” and “harvest gold.” However, the early seventies were a good time to be an undergraduate: student deferment, reasonably affordable tuition, and a generation of “co-eds” (as we were already starting not to call them) keen to test-drive their oral contraceptives. Dear me, I feel a “kids today” rant starting to come on…
Carlo Graziani
@Auntie Anne: Thank you.
Xavier
@gene108: OT, but the condition of budget balance (Clinton’s surplus of which progressives are so proud, and Trump’s deficits which conservatives desperately ignore) is irrelevant except for its effects on employment and inflation.
Abba Lerner pointed this out in his paper Functional Finance and the Federal Deficit (1943): “The first financial responsibility of the government (since nobody else can undertake that responsibility) is to keep the total rate of spending in the country on goods and services neither greater nor less than that rate which at the current prices would buy all the goods that it is possible to produce. If total spending is allowed to go above this there will be inflation, and if it is allowed to go below this there will be unemployment. The government can increase total spending by spending more itself or by reducing taxes so that the taxpayers have more money left to spend. It can reduce total spending by spending less itself or by raising taxes so that taxpayers have less money left to spend.”
catclub
@Xavier:
My little hobby horse. Unemployment in Germany in 1933 was 47%.
Hyperinflation happened in 1923. It hurt people who loaned money – rich people. The nation recovered from it by 1927.
I think there was a bit more anxiety in 1933 among the working class majority.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Matt McIrvin:
Here you go, a little dose of nihilism for our side:
https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/1515023321603133446
Calouste
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I also think that a lot of people when no they no longer feel an existential threat lose a sense of purpose. For most of history, life was a struggle for 99.9% of humanity, and there were existential threats (wars, pandemics, natural disasters) at regular intervals. Now, for 10% or so of humanity, life’s actually pretty good, but there’s not much of a purpose beyond birth, school, work, retirement, death. Hating on whatever the boogieman-du-jour is (currently trans people) gives a fair few people that sense of purpose. They feel like they need to fight against something.
Like the Brexiteers in Britain were drawing comparisons between Brexit and WWII, it gave some purpose and glamor to their bland, solid, lives.
gene108
@Carlo Graziani:
I wonder how much things not taking care of itself had to do with the mismanagement of Bush, Jr. The deindustrialization of this country only picked up pace during the Bush years.
Al Gore was talking about investing the surplus in infrastructure, human capital, etc. Bush, Jr. promised everyone a $300 check, because the surplus was our money.
bookworm1398
@Carlo Graziani:
China made it difficult to declare that freedom and not capitalism was the reason for winning the Cold War.
catclub
@gene108:
Same reason a dog licks his balls. because it can.
gene108
@catclub:
So the motherfuckers in state legislatures, university boards of trustees, etc. can just cut tuition with no impact on the university system?
If a dog can lick its balls going up, it lick them going down without a problem.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Calouste:
Yes, I agree with this.
There is a time & a place for hating people, in the right cause and in due proportion to the enormity of the stakes involved. IIRC there is a passage in one of my WW II books in which Eisenhower is touring one of the German concentration camps that had just been liberated, and asks one of the people in his entourage “are you still having trouble hating them, now?” (them meaning the Nazis)
But to crank up hatred out of boredom, out of having nothing better to do with your life, against people who do not threaten you in any way, is a moral obscenity.
catclub
@gene108:
I said nothing about no impact. What I meant was as long as there are loans available to pay the raised tuition, and lots of students willing to apply for those loans and pay that tuition, the university sees no point to keeping tuition down.
As long as higher education is seen as necessary for financial advancement, there will be high demand for it.
Carlo Graziani
@bookworm1398:
The discussion of “freedom” is going to get more nuanced in installments to come. In any event, I would turn your comment around and say that China learned that capitalism, rather than “freedom” was the reason for the West’s success.
Matt McIrvin
@Calouste: There’s always the fight to extend freedom and justice! That search for purpose is, I think, part of the reason I generally supported LGBT rights (that and the need to support my friends who are affected directly)
The right dismisses this as ridiculous “virtue signaling”. So they’ve cut out those sources of purpose already– it has to be something mean and stupid.
Ishiyama
@Baud: I shared my thoughts because I was encouraged to think they would be a contribution. It’s easy to dismiss concerns that have no place in one’s own life.How would anyone like to have to dismiss all thoughts of public service because of your private interests?
“The toad beneath the harrow knows where every separate tooth point goes. The butterfly upon the road preaches contentment to the toad.”
Mike E
@gene108: I hear ya. Miss E is back at it 8 years after trying UNC Elsewhere for a year, and now is doing the community college route with a possible entry to a state program. Being in her mid 20’s gives her better perspective than I ever had walking with my degree at 21, except it being exponentially more costly of course. I hate it for this generation, and I tend to blame the guy in my mirror.
kalakal
@Mike E:
I’d tell a joke I know about trickle down but 99% of you won’t get it
Ishiyama
@Mike E: In 1970 my tuition for my first semester of the flagship university of a State system was, like, $240.00. The first crack in the wall was charging out-of-State students more for tuition. After than, it went up for everybody.
Carlo Graziani
@Ishiyama: The Democratic Party scored a lot of own-goals in the name of Centrism in those years. Honestly, I could see the immediate tactical acumen, but it always struck me as coming at the expense of the higher-level political wisdom. I was never a fan of Clinton-era triangulation.
Ishiyama
@Carlo Graziani: Chiang Ching said that the CCP was being taken over by “Capitalist Roaders”; she wasn’t wrong.
Calouste
@Matt McIrvin: Some people want fight for something, other people want fight against something. The latter seem to be mostly on the right. I think it’s for a part the ingroup/outgroup dynamic that gives conservatives their identity, they feel like they have to defend their ingroup against the outgroup.
YY_Sima Qian
Speaking from the East Asian perspective, E/SE Asia has been the greatest beneficiaries of the decades of globalization, so generally do not view it w/ the negativity that has become prevalent in North America & Europe, & are instead filled w/ dread & foreboding at the prospect of even partial de-globalization. Leaders & tycoons from the region were some of the favorites guest speakers & panelists at Davos, but I did get the sense that these figures were mainly humoring the self-congratulatory mood of the “Davos crowd” to maintain the momentum of globalization. In their actual actions, it is clear none of the economies in the region (other than Hong Kong) bought into the neoliberal dogma, as state intervention in economic affairs are taken for granted in international trade (“mercantilism”) & domestic activity (“industrial policy”). Of course, most of the economies in the region were in the rapid catch phase from Low Income status, so growing the size of the pie was prioritized, there inequality are major issues in many. However, unlike in North America & Europe, people in E/SE Asia do feel their lives are improving measurably from generation to generation (Japanese stagnation being an exception).
Overall globalization was good for most of the world, a tremendous amount of wealth & value were generated (growing the size of the pie). However, neoliberal dogma & kleptocratic capture ensured that most of the wealth & accumulated value were concentrated in the hands of the few. In North American & Europe (to a lesser extent & to varying degrees) the pie could not be grown fast (due to the high base) enough to mask the inequities. BTW, automation might have been an even bigger factor in depressing working class wages than globalization, & the gains from automation accrued to the relatively few, too. Rising waters has not been lifting all boats in the industrialized West.
Globalization is also not necessarily “free” trade. In reality, very few economies practice true free trade (the US & the EU jealously protect their farmers & aircraft manufacturers, for example). The “free” trade frameworks traditionally promoted by DC & Brussels typically serve to entrench existing economic structures & relationships. The TPP was louded as “liberal” & “ambitious”, & there were progressive elements in it (protections for organized labor & environment). However, it also had clauses that would have severely hampered the ability of the developing economies to climb the value chain, by limiting the scope of industrial policy & giving primacy to existing IP. The CPTPP countries had the good sense to junk at least the IP related clauses. RCEP, the parallel regional trade pact promoted by China & the ASEAN, has been derided in the Anglosphere as “unambitious”, but I wonder if it’s more cautious & conservative approach might prove more sustainable.
Not that there aren’t significant problems w/ Asian state capitalism models: inefficiency, a different kind of kleptocracy, unfair competition. As an employee of an American company in China, I certainly see the unfair competition 1st hand. However, competition is often unfair in the developed economies, too.
kalakal
@Mike E: In the UK when I first went to uni it was free and (nearly) everybody got a full grant equivalent to full unemployment benefit. They froze the grant in the late 80s and scrapped it in the 90s. Tuition fees at 1,000 a year started in the late 90s. sometime around 2007 they hiked it from 3,000 pa to up to 9,000 ie unis could charge up to. It was a total farce, the Tories imagined a price war between institutions and we all just charged the max. What they had done was remove a lot of state funding, I remember running the numbers at the uni I worked at and we could only manage on that by scrapping courses. There was no limit on fees for overseas students so we got heavily into that. Then came Brexit which cratered that market. So lots of students in debt, poor people excluded and institutions starved of cash. A Tory triumph
Ksmiami
@Villago Delenda Est: I think unregulated social media grew faster than what most humans- esp ones not trained to recognize good sources etc- could actually deal with. And so much of what the political debate consists of is just insane.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: China learned from its neighbors that the reason for the West’s wealth was capitalism (well, also colonial plunder, structural hegemony, etc.) & not so much freedom. Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia & Thailand all saw significant growth under right wing authoritarian regimes (some quite hardline). Singapore prospered under a highly paternalistic soft authoritarian regime. Japan post-WW II has mostly been a single party state, w/ most important decisions mediated w/in the LDP & between the LDP & the civil service. Therefore, more importantly, China learned that state capitalism worked.
The lesson was always obvious (& gratifying) to über-paternalistic authoritarians such as Deng Xiaoping.
Another Scott
@Carlo Graziani:
That’s not quite my recollection. Let’s see…
LATimes (from October 1993):
As usual, the President proposes, the Congress disposes.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: Hey there.
I also want to state: I believe quite firmly in the benefits of globalization, properly managed. I am quite aware of what a difference Western investment can make in the lives of people living in poorer areas of the globe.
I am, however, troubled by the unregulated, party-hardy enthusiasm with which globalization investment was pursued as a means to evade labor and environmental regulations. This “liberalism” had the effect of transferring the costs to the workers in the West who had to accept worse working conditions, and on the workers in the poor countries to which the work was outsourced, who were in no position to impose any kind of safety conditions for themselves, while at the same time bringing benefits exclusively to shareholders and board members of the corporations that employed those workers.
Calouste
@YY_Sima Qian:
There are some sectors that for various reasons need to be protected, and those are two of them. Significant dependence on the import of food is a problem for a country, see the effects of the war in Ukraine on the world grain market. And aircraft manufacturing requires massive capital investment in a rather volatile market, which either means you protect those few companies that do it beforehand, or you cough of massive amounts of state support when an unexpected downturn hits.
Another Scott
@Xavier: Dean Baker talks about this quite often, but expresses it differently. He talks about the “accounting identity” (from 2011), namely:
The trade deficit has been ignored in Washington since Reagan’s days (when he exploded it). But it really does have real-world consequences, and is tied up with things that people don’t think enough about…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
When Obama started his 1st term, “nudging” seemed to be a favored approach to economic policy among his advisors & cabinet officials, make the greatest possible impact w/ the least amount of overt government intervention. I was quite intrigued by the idea. When the GOP won bad the house in the 2010 mid-terms, as prospects of further reform dimmed, I reassessed & though “nudging” could not address the multiple crises the US & the world faced. Trump’s election in 2016, against all expectations, cemented for me the need for structural change, but also made me pessimistic about the prospects for such change w/o suffering some kind of cataclysm 1st. 1 year of Biden, for all of the good things he has done, has not made me more optimistic. Perhaps Carlo can help! ;-)
I also understood & even agreed w/ Obama’s decision to focus on addressing the immediate economic crisis, & rather than get stuck “litigating the past”. However, the failure to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its war crimes (unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country under false pretenses) & crimes against humanity (extraordinary rendition, torture, ex-judicial indefinite detention), & financial institutions for their shady dealings, provided detrimental in the longer terms. In hindsight, the screaming Lefties were right!
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Completely agree.
YY_Sima Qian
Kropacetic
One needs to know how to be right. Screaming is not conducive to getting people to listen.
YY_Sima Qian
@Kropacetic: Very true. I had no patience for them back then for that very reason.
Sister Golden Bear
@gene108:
I visited Turkey around a decade ago, and the tour guide (who was otherwise extremely liberal) was pretty damn salty about it. Noted that that Bulgaria — the poorest nation in the EU — had a GDP one-tenth the size of of Turkey, with a limited number of struggling economic sections. Whereas Turkey had a vibrant multi-sector economy with strong exports.
Kropacetic
@YY_Sima Qian: Granted, that’s a two way street too.
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: Liberalizing didn’t seem to hurt Taiwan & South Korea when it happened, rather the opposite. But it does seem to be an option.
Matt McIrvin
@Kropacetic: Today, the screaming Lefties seem to be endorsing fascism. I tried to pay more attention to them in the aftermath of Iraq but they just seem to have gotten dumber and dumber, their hatred of liberals driving them into the arms of the cultural hard right out of some idea that this is going to reconstruct the New Deal coalition.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: If you mean economic liberalization by Taiwan & SK, they remain much more state interventionist than neoliberal dogma would accept. The the extent that they did take reforms that aligned w/ neoliberalism, it has resulted in rising inequality & increasing exploitation of labor (especially foreign guest workers). The same applies to other E/SE Asian countries, including China. But none bought into neoliberalism wholeheartedly.
ian
@gene108:
When was the last time you remember hearing of a major college institution opening? There are some, this article says there are a 1000 of them in the past 20 years, but many are small and private, and the same source says they cost about 20,000$+. Meanwhile, the number of potential students is growing, and the number of people who want to go to college is growing. The supply of college is holding relatively steady, while the demand for college is through the roof. Coupled with rising overall costs for land, utilities, salaries, and expensive puff pieces like football programs and more administrators, in tandem with decreasing state support- you get rising costs on students.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
Just finished a 16 hour workday and read this. Forgive me if I missed this but there is one huge gaping hole in your explanation of this anxiety. For the first time in human history we have a network that allows immediate, global communication. I think the uniqueness and ubiquity of the internet has provided a feedback loop for anxiety so that now issues and problems on the other side of the world can cause anxiety in Topeka Kansas even though it most likely will never reach said town. The immediacy and graphic nature of Internet news from around the world, the constancy of the news combined with our addiction to being on screen, all the time, and the amount of propaganda and confusion mixed into this maelstrom is surely unique in history. Not to mention the rate at which data has grown. If the world was a mystery 50 years ago, imagine the anxiety a person might experience looking at just how much more there is to know, to experience, to miss out on, and how overwhelming it must be. My mother will be 89 yes old in a week. After I had debunked no few Facebook posts she had forwarded to me, she asked me how on Earth was she’s supposed to keep up with all that and I had to agree. Even for the highly educated and motivated consumer it’s practically impossible to control the deluge that has resulted from modern technology.
I gotta get some sleep. If you all discussed this already, sorry.
sab
We sent my stepson to machinist/welding trade school about ten years ago. He loved it, but he dropped out at the end when he thought all he would be doing was watching robots do his job.
Hired on in the real world a couple of months later. Robots are out there doing a lot that people used to do, but there are a lot of jobs that robots can’t do, and employers are desperate for real thinking people who can do those jobs.
Geminid
@Calouste: An interesting contrast to the huge capital costs required for modern aircraft manufacture is the relative ease and cheapness of drone manufacture. Just the forgings for a jet fighter’s landing gear require major tooling investments, but drones are lighter and their parts are much easier to make. Countries like Turkey and Israel buy warplanes from the U.S. and there are only a few alternatives, but both Turkey and Israel have small but thriving military drone industries.
Geminid
@Carlo Graziani: Carlo, you might find a short article by M.D. Russ a succinct explaination of the process by which the Republican party produced a President Trump. It’s titled, “Trump is the Republican President,” and was published by Bearing Drift June 26, 2020.
The author is a self-described conservative independent. He traces trumpism back to Gingrich’s “Contract for America” and refutes the notion that Trump somehow hijacked and rebranded the party. Russ concludes that no, Trump “just answered the casting call.”
Carlo Graziani
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: Yeah, you’re right. But the Internet is a huge topic, and this essay is already kind of bulging at the seams, if you know what I mean. In my defense, I would argue that the Internet began to be really relevant when broadband became widely available and cheap, which was probably circa 2003-2005, about half way through this story. Prior to that, the big “new” media thing that everyone was appalled by was 24-hour cable news!
So I would think of the Internet in terms of what arson investigators call an “accelerant”: not the cause of the blaze, but perhaps the reason that it couldn’t be controlled.
Carlo Graziani
@Geminid: What a beautifully succinct formulation.
When I wrote that Trump “took control” of the party I pretty much meant this. Not that he “hijacked” it, but rather that he stepped into the role that the party had inadvertently created for him. The Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce axis of the party believed that it would maintain control of the party in perpetuity, in virtue of the fact that they paid the bills, and the rest of the coalition—the religious loons and the trailer park yahoos—could just lump it. They were very surprised to be wrong.
UncleEbeneezer
“I know that it leaves out the America’s shabby treatment of Blacks and the concomitant manipulation of racism…and other factors that are dispiritingly constant factors in US social history going back to the age of Andrew Jackson, if not earlier.”
Really would love to see a version of this that incorporates America’s Racism into it. Seems hard to tell ANY broad story involving the US without that. That said, really enjoying reading and thinking about this all. Thanks for sharing. As a 49 year old (shakes fist at booster ineligibility) alot of this is right in the sweet spot of everything that was happening once I first started paying attention to politics, so it’s fascinating to read.
wetzel
@Carlo Graziani:
If this is the low point, you’ve got a sunnier disposition than me for sure!!!
I think you can see the rise of demagoguery, the rise of fascist styles of leadership in the West, over the past ten years, as a kind of animistic bubbling up of ‘anxiety’, or identity crisis.
In globalization our inputs to hand are the same in Dubai as San Francisco. From the assembler to the executive. This is a constant identity crisis. Globalization is cultural assimilation, but to what? Like Lysander and Demetrius in Midsummer NIght’s Dream we don’t know who we are or what we want! We are the same as each other. Scientifically reproducible. We are everything that has gotten lost. We can be driven to chase devils all night.
Where are the fascisms rising up from? Going back to the klan and the noose through some mythopoesis in sacrificial crisis to find a folk death mechanism?
Or are these schizophrenias programmed to bubble up through state active measures by global Putinism and manipulation by non-governmental organizations such as Murdoch, the Koch’s and a significant part of the GOP party apparatus and the NRA. Paranoia serves their propaganda. They cannot lose because the destruction of culture will produce scientific totalitarianism eventually in us as well as Russia and China.
If the battles were going differently in Ukraine, if Russian tanks were stronger, would your thesis be any different? If so then you are taking Western might as evidence of the rightness of our ideology. Either that or you have a providential theory of history. In Husserl’s phenomenology and the existentialist philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, Bachelard there’s been enough critique of totalizing phenomenologies of history.
When Elon Musk defeats Prince Salmon for Twitter, it will be like Godzilla defeating Ghidorah. That’s who’s ‘making history’. Elon the anointed. I am psychoanalyzing too much. It feels like there is a wish for history to have an author, where we can interpret history to understand the intentions of its author. That is a kind of religious experience, so I am not going to argue. But if I’m having the feeling history has an author is something I can claim and support rationally, then I need to ask myself what in my unconscious desires this? What am I trying to accommodate?
Citizen Alan
@catclub:my suspicion has always been that if anyone ever did serious research, it would show that tuition increases mainly gi to subsidize athletics.
Citizen Alan
@Carlo Graziani: Anone who wants to bitch about “triangulation” is invited to suggest an alternative viable response for Democrats in 1992 to the fact that the GOP had controlled the White House continuously for 20 of the last 24 years. And but fir Watergate, even Carter would have lost.