Following on several of the posts today, but to step back a bit from the campaign issues a bit, The Guardian has run a long read, long form report on the roots of Trumpism, or perhaps more accurately, what is being called the alt-right. Here’s a taste, but as a student of socio-cultural identity and its powerful effects, I highly recommend you click across and read the whole thing.
Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.
But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.
This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.
The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”…
… But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.
For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.
Burnham’s newfound zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.
redshirt
TL;DR: Racism?
Mary G
I read that. It’s depressing that just as the old school ratfuckers like Roger Stone are on their last legs, we have to deal with this whole new iteration. Trump may look like an idiot, but his whole campaign is an audition for the first man on the new gravy train.
Calming Influence
I read this piece yesterday, and it made me bookmark the Guardian’s “Long Read” link. Very well written and informative. I thought the white nationalist links with the right rose out of the civil rights 60s, but it clearly had roots well before that.
Jeffro
I read it as “racist rump has always been racist rump and gets cranked at Establishment for not letting it fly its freak flag…this time around, racist rump (plurality or majority of major US party TBD) appears to have Establishment on the run”
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Why do you even bother?
Villago Delenda Est
@redshirt: Basically. Rear-guard defense of white male “Christian” dominance. It’s been fought, essentially, from the Enlightenment on, when the supernatural prop was kicked away.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
How very (yawn) 1930s and Calvinist of him. And how was he any different than the Nazis or Japanese Imperialists?
One would think these Right wing wankers would occasional have an original thought between them.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Bother with what?
Jeffro
Also, what is the left-wing equivalent of having your party taken over by a know-nothing with major ties to the dolt-Right, then putting a major dolt-Right media figure in charge of your failing campaign? I’m just wondering what it looks like to ‘normal’ Republicans at this point. (Not sympathizing, just theorizing)
Villago Delenda Est
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The fascist movement has never recovered from the damage done to the brand by the Nazis and their industrialized murder of Jews, Roma, and other “undesirables” during WWII.
Adam L Silverman
@Calming Influence: There are fringeyer links that he didn’t go into that were also picked up after WW II by some returning vets. The Silver Shirts, which was partially rooted in pre WW II crypto-fascism, but had a harder anti-Semitic and racist component, but also had an anti-New Deal component too. The Silver Shirts also sit at the beginning of a chain of ideas and groups that gets us to the Posse Comitatus movement and from there to the Sagebrush Rebellion types and then the militia movements and then, ultimately, to the Bundys.
redshirt
@Villago Delenda Est: I suppose you could say “The Other”, and that role has been filled by different peoples throughout history.
But for America, it’s clearly race. It defines nearly everything about this country, even as we celebrate “The Melting Pot”.
dexwood
PT Trump stars in his own delusional Greatest Show on Earth. Sad.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Exactly.
Omnes Omnibus
Moi? I don’t think that Burnham actually understood Machiavelli.
Miss Bianca
So *that*’s what led to Buckley!
I’ll have to read the whole thing tonight – thanks for pointing it out. Just the distraction I need to take my mind off not going to Jordan.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Calvinist?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Wait, what….?
What’s with the hard right and Trotsky connection??
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: You have to read the whole thing. I’m not sure he actually got all the nuance of Machiavelli, but when you read the whole article you can see where Burnham was delineating, even if his thinking hadn’t completely coalesced, a coherent ideology that encompassed resentment, revanchism, ethno-nationalism, populism – specifically a variant of the Constitutional populism I’ve mentioned in a few comments, radical individualism, an anti-expertise concept that leads into anti-science and education. And he wasn’t writing for VDare or something. Rather he was there at the beginning with Buckley.
James E Powell
Surprised no mention of John Birch Society
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: You were going to Jordan? As in the country?
James E Powell
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Romantics. All of them.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, Calvism and in John Calvin – everyone is utterly depraved. Even when we are being nice it’s because we want a reward and so on. Conservatives lover their Calvin, that’s why all the nonsense about liberals are dishonest and faking it and why the It’s Okay when your a Republican because Jesus has chosen you, so it don’t matter how nasty you are.
Adam L Silverman
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Woman scorned sort of thing.
(no offense intended for actual women who have been scorned)
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman:
Or as W put it, “leading with your gut”
With a nod to whomever first said, “the facts/science have a well-known liberal bias”
Which of course culminates in “Says who?”
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: Its all about having a healthy biome.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: “The facts don’t agree with me (or my steady paycheck) so I’m not going to agree with them” – most Republicans, and all dolt-Rightists.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I did read the whole thing. I just don’t buy into the Machiavellian means do whatever. Largely because I have actually read “The Prince.”
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Gotcha, wasn’t sure you’d had time to go read the whole piece. I agree that he’s a bit squishy on his understanding of Machiavelli.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Omnes Omnibus:
Very few people ever have.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Nietzsche was one of the first to speak about the connection between diet and mind. Now we can understand the human body as a biome, one that supports much more life than just ours. Literal pounds of bacteria live within you right now and we live because they are there. Pounds. This biome feeds off what we eat, what we are made of. They are reflections of ourselves.
Omnes Omnibus
: @Enhanced Voting Techniques:
You haven’t read a word Calvin wrote (even in translation), have you?
Joeff
Why does race figure so prominently? Seems like the issue is loss of status for the dominant group. In 19th century WASPs of all classes in US hated Irish, then southern/eastern Euro immigrants including Jews in addition to blacks/Browns.
redshirt
@Joeff: Slavery as an institution.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Yup. Accent on “was”.
ETA: Damn, this is making me want to go back and re-read “The Prince”, Calvin, I’m not so sure about.
It’s interesting all this is coming up just as it looks like Trump’s campaign is going to slide right into Goebbels and Atwater territory. Fasten your seatbelts, everybody…
redshirt
As this is an open thread, I wanted to express how awesome that women’s beach volleyball bronze medal game was. So dramatic and exciting, and I was impressed by how classy the Americans were after the win. High/Low Tening every stadium grounds worker? So cool.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: And mine hates me.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: You understand that its basically wedged between an active war zone and the portion of an occupied territory that’s being used as an area of strategic depth in case of invasion, right?
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Yup. That’s why I thought the trip had been called off altogether. Now it’s on again, but I’m not part of it. And the workshops in the refugee camp are right out.
ETA: Why do you think I was asking you for links to all your papers, Adam? I was shamelessly pumping you for information!
divF
The Guardian article is pretty good. Although much of the story is well-known, the Burnham thread is new. But the fundamental fact remains: the GOP alliance is falling apart. Redistributive populism is anathema to the plutocrats, and white nationalism / white rage is distasteful, even threatening to the conservative managerial class. If the white working class gives up the racism while keeping the populism, they become democrats. Without the plutocrats, the funding model that keeps them afloat as a political force is not viable. Time is not on their side, as the country becomes more diverse.
Also, the photo of Buckley at Yale on the occasion of getting an honorary degree is repellent. Between him and the Bushes, Yale has much to answer for.
FlyingToaster
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
@Omnes Omnibus:
I have, and have been to the wall of the patriarchs in Geneva to boot.
Calvin didn’t write that. Republicans interpret Calvin’s “salvation through grace, not good works” to mean that they can be absolute shits because they’re already saved.
My beef with Calvin (and with various other theologies) is “theory of the elect, my eye”. No self-respecting deity would want any part of pre-selecting anything. The fun is in rolling the dice and seeing what happens.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Okay. Not sure what workshops in the refugee camp mean. And I’m not emailing the UNHCR at this hour.
Splitting Image
Machiavelli would have punched this idiot in the neck.
Machiavelli did indeed believe that politics was and is an unending war for dominance, but his advice to would-be potentates was to ally themselves with the common people against the aristocracy, because you can placate commoners by giving them a more lenient government than they can expect from your rivals, but there’s nothing you can do to make your aristocratic rivals give up the idea of killing you and placing themselves on your throne.
Democracy then isn’t a myth. It’s a sound policy for an elite to keep itself secure on top. FDR understood this. It’s why he implemented the New Deal. Give the people enough food to feed themselves, and they’ll stick with you rather than try their luck with a Hitler or a Stalin. Machiavelli understood this too, which makes his philosophy cynical but not dystopian.
Makes sense though that Burnham would be depressed by FDR’s efforts to relieve the suffering of the Depression. The Glorious Worker’s Paradise might have been within grasp if he hadn’t un-heightened those contradictions.
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: I have always thought that given the theory of the elect, the chances for anyone person to be predestined for heaven are so low, that it makes sense to just do what feels good and enjoy oneself. Of course this is easy for me to say, I’m not Christian.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlyingToaster: I don’t have a problem with your problem with Calvin. I share it. I’ve only been in the Geneva airport.
Mike in DC
Sadly, these guys will be around, in one form or another, for at least the next 40 years. What effect the actual shift to minority status for whites will have on their mindset remains to be seen, but at least their political power should diminish over time.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: No need. Circus workshops. There is a guy in the Zataari refugee camp who does social circus with the kids there. Some nice patrician Jordanian lady with connections was paying our way over there to work with the guy. Now that’s off – altho’ he may still meet up with our folks later, but it’ll be somewhere else. So they’re going to work with some other groups.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: As a member of the Elect, let me tell you, it’s terrible.
redshirt
@Mike in DC: A white minority can still maintain power for some time given the proper laws. See, Israel. Or South Africa pre 1990’s.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: Ronald Reagan, aka the shitty grade Z movie star = shitstain.
Miss Bianca
@redshirt: Now comes one of the only times I can think of where I get to trot out a line I remember from one of my childhood story books: “How do ye ken ye’re one of the Elect?”
divF
@FlyingToaster:
reminds me of a wedding I once went to, held at a Presbyterian church in San Francisco. One wall had a larger-than-life-size mural of four dour men in long black robes – my guess is Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and one other (ETA: Luther?). At the time, it seemed to me an inauspicious setting for starting out married life.
Turned out I was wrong, though – their marriage has been a long and happy one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca:” Aye, there’s the rub.”
redshirt
@Miss Bianca: Several corroborating fortune cookies.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Hence my response in comment #46.
Splitting Image
@Miss Bianca:
Hillary couldn’t win Pennsylvania without cheating.
Omnes Omnibus
@Splitting Image: Heh?
inventor
@srv: Reagan began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a call for a return to “state’s rights”. Then he sold weapons to America’s enemies.
Should have been impeached, removed from office, tried for treason, convicted and executed.
KS in MA
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Most people who want to quote Calvin to support their own political agenda misunderstand Calvin, ’cause (though he was involved in politics) that’s not what he was doing.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: that’s a unique take on the notion, Adam, and one I find much more to my taste than either paralyzing depression over the uncertainty or acting like an unmitigated asshole piling up worldly wealth to try to *prove* your Elect-ness. Maybe you’re right, maybe it does take a non-Christian to cotton on to it!
@redshirt: : )
Adam L Silverman
@inventor: And ended his campaign by cutting a deal with Iran to continue to hold American’s hostage in order to benefit his electoral chances:
https://consortiumnews.com/the-new-october-surprise-series/
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: I’m the daughter of a Jewish engineer and Presbyterian Sunday School teacher, who raised us “both”. We spent 6 days a week at the JCC, and one morning a week at my mom’s church.
When Toby Ziegler said to Josh Lyman, “You know, the Ancient Hebrews had a word for Jews from Westport. They pronounced it Presbyterian.” I fell off the sofa laughing. The only difference between my parents’ practices were that my dad didn’t eat pork.
Omnes Omnibus
@inventor: Wow, that fact will have such a great effect during the upcoming election. Is there anything else you can offer?
RandomMonster
For us ‘olds’, unlock for me the syntax of the first comment. Adam, Redshirt, please?
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Also, I think nature as Satan’s playground was a wonderful turn of phrase. And Satan’s playground would make a great name for either a nightclub or a heavy metal band.
Viva BrisVegas
If I may be permitted to torture a metaphor.
The elephant in the room is not the Republican Party, it’s income inequality. The fact that the 0.1% are sucking all the juice out of the economy means that us little people are left fighting over the dry shriveled husk that is left over.
Conservative intellectualism, such as it is, is essentially about protecting the sucking process and redirecting everybody’s attention somewhere else. Preferably at people of color, but anybody will do at a pinch.
This is not just a US phenomenon, it’s exists right across the West in varying degrees depending on just how hard the 0.1% are sucking. Since this transfer of wealth is exponential, it’s going to be rough ride for those who don’t have a room at the top.
There has never been a better time to be a Donald Trump, or a worse time to be a Ralph Kramden.
Miss Bianca
completely o/t, but why is my old dog suddenly eating dirt out of my potted tomato plant like it’s ice cream?
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: Kind of a variant of the Irish folk song the Orange and the Green.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqs4EbU02As
Chris
The interesting thing is that for much of the 20th century within the Republican Party, the war was being waged by conservatives against a moderate-to-liberal establishment, but the conservatives won that war pretty decisively in the latter decades of that century (Reagan’s victory over George H. W. Bush, the Gingrich Congress of the nineties, Bush’s son becoming president and governing very much as a Reaganesque conservative). Basically, the conservatives who were insurgents for much of the 20th century became the new establishment. Which is now being threatened by its own base, either because it’s not delivering enough conservatism or because conservatism isn’t keeping its promises.
Where does that “dissenting minority” rank in that history? Alongside the Goldwaterites/Reaganites who eventually took over the party, or as a separate group altogether?
Raven Onthill
Orwell reviewed The Managerial Revolution and Burnham’s politics back in 1946, did you know? Not favorably. Orwell: “It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.” And that is where I have seen Burnham’s name before. So that’s where Burnham ended up! Just where I might have guessed, if I’d thought of it at all.
Adam L Silverman
@RandomMonster: TL;DR means too long, didn’t read. She does this on occasion at the start of the comments where its a long post. Why, I have no idea.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Maybe “Satan’s Playground” ought to be the name of a new nature preserve instead, nu? : )
If it were the name of a club, it would probably get picketed by crazies. Ooh, ooh, I know! It could be a combination night club and women’s health clinic?
divF
@FlyingToaster: As the joke goes, “I’m an Anglican, my father is an Anglican, my grandfather, zikhrono livrakha, was an Anglican.”
FlyingToaster
@divF:
and Beza (or de Béze).
Luther was that fucking German ass-kisser of the nobility :) (see: An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation).
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I don’t know. As long as he’ll drink water, he’s usually okay, but I’d call the vet tomorrow. Did you fertilize it with a nitrogen based fertilizer like Milorganite? Or a real manure one? Both of those taste good to dogs, but my understanding is they won’t harm them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven Onthill: Yeah, folks got there. Thanks.
divF
@FlyingToaster: Thank you.
ETA:
Whose love is given over-well
Shall look on Helen’s face in hell,
Whilst those whose love is thin and wise
May view John Knox in Paradise.
– Dorothy Parker
RandomMonster
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you. In retrospect I should’ve just googled that shit. Thanks.
Adam L Silverman
@Raven Onthill: I was not alive in 1946! But that is interesting.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I’m not touching that recommendation.
redshirt
@RandomMonster: Too Long, Didn’t Read: TL;DR
Adam L Silverman
@RandomMonster: No worries. Happy to help.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: I haven’t fertilized it at all – I enhanced the potting soil with some worm castings, but that was a long time ago. H’mm. Well, I’ll call the clinic.
J R in WV
@FlyingToaster:
Aren’t Calvinists big into predestination? I dated a girl once (allowed to say that because I was a boy at the time) and after the movie while having a sandwich and a coke I discovered that she belonged to a church that believed in predestination. Last date. Only date.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Which one? ; )
(all together now: “All of them, Katie!”)
Mary G
I hate the bright yellow front/hot pink back Nikes so many of the Olympians are wearing.
danielx
@redshirt:
I think it has to do with how race is wrapped up with slavery, and in turn with the distaste (to put it mildly) that (some) whites in this country have held for black and brown people since forever. Slavery is, in point of fact, this country’s Original Sin.
redshirt
@Mary G: Millennial colors.
Kids today!!
Calming Influence
@Adam L Silverman: Sorry I haven’t replied sooner (Mariners are ahead!!!) I’m googling.the hell out of “the silvershirts”. I’ve never heard of them, but the “shirts” part is a bit of a tell…
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Like I said as long as he’ll drink and isn’t lying down nose in towards a wall he should be okay. Not drinking and lying nose in towards a wall are a bad sign.
danielx
@Adam L Silverman:
Always thought Black Velvet Elvis would be a most excellent band name.
FlyingToaster
@divF: I know that feeling.
I usually just explain my ancestry by noting that the countries my ancestors came from stopped existing shortly after they left.*
*Not exactly a joke. Ever heard of the United Netherlands or Swedish Pomerania?
Miss Bianca
@J R in WV: Why, did she tell you you were pre-destined, too?
redshirt
@Calming Influence: Non Italian Red Shirts are great fallows overall, certainly.
Omnes Omnibus
@J R in WV: If you want to be simplistic. The reality is more complicated.
David Fud
@divF: Now, this is the most concise explanation of the often predicted breakups of the Republican Party that I have seen.
It makes sense, hangs together, and makes it seem even more imminent.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: fusion nightclub and women’s health clinic
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: I’m just seeing as part of a general aging breakdown – she’s started eating random scraps of paper, too. And bits of wood out of the kindling pile. The dirt is a new thing. But she’s drinking heartily, so I guess that’s OK. Thanks!
divF
@FlyingToaster:
Only on Wikipedia.
Chris
@Splitting Image:
Yep. He wasn’t the first to think of this. This is much of medieval European history right there: presenting yourself as a defender of the commoners was a time-honored way for kings and emperors to keep the aristocracy in check.
I’ll have to think some more about the distinction Machiavelli makes between commoners who can be dealt with reasonably and aristocrats who can’t be, because it mirrors one of my own lines of thought about the modern world. The last hundred years have made it pretty clear that you really can’t expect good faith and peaceful coexistence from our elites – we tried building a cooperative society out of the Progressive and New Deal eras, the wealthy went along with it because they basically had no choice, but it was a temporary truce and as soon as there were enough cracks in public opinion, they seized the opportunity to start rolling back the clock to the Gilded Age. I’m not calling for Jacobin/Communist solutions, obviously, but it is something that has to be kept in mind by those attempting to rebuild/expand/strengthen the safety net.
Richard Mayhew’s threads over the last couple of days about major health insurance companies’ behavior even after the massive gift that was the ACA makes the point quite nicely. Our elites will never have enough.
FlyingToaster
@J R in WV: That’s the whole “Theory of the Elect” conundrum. If you’re one of the Elect, God already chose to save you. You should be good as an example to all of those poor doomed souls around you. Predestination is the core of the belief.
However, in most of America’s fundy-based theology, being one of the Elect means you can act like the preacher’s son and suffer few if any consequences.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: It’ll have to be a band name then, man. And you’re right – it would be an awesome band name.
Adam L Silverman
@Calming Influence: Sorry, the correct/formal name was the Silver Legion. They were also/sometimes called the Silver Shirts. It was started in 1933 and served as the intellectual breeding place for a number of post WW II extremism groups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Legion_of_America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dudley_Pelley
For instance, the founder of the Posse Comitatus movement was a Silver Shirt before WW II:
http://www.nebraskastudies.org/1000/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/1000/stories/1001_0115.html
Barb2
@Adam L Silverman:
Skinheads of Northern Idaho. Where do the John Birches fit? On long Interstate drives (I-5, I-90, 50, 40 etc.) There are always the large ranches with huge signs with code words used by the fringe right. The same melting pot of slime that spawned the modern Bundy gang.
The skinheads, of Northern Idaho were around for decades, they seem to have been cleaned out for now. The lone wolves in rural areas tend to stick out, driving camouflage trucks, with flags and signs. AZ has several no building code zones where the second amendment cults are nesting. Rather like the modern tribalism that Cultural Anthropology students study.
The roadside sign makers don’t forget their version of Jesus.
The west is endlessly interesting. The Go-west gene brings some strange critters to the wide open spaces.
You have a major task – tracking and fitting the pieces into a coherent picture.
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: I know someone from Sweden that has a pomeranian. Does that count?
redshirt
@Barb2: I love the idea of a “Go West” gene. Is there such a gene?
FlyingToaster
@divF: My ancestors spoke Ladino instead, but I certainly resemble that remark.
Omnes Omnibus
People who understand neither Machiavelli nor Calvin spouting off about both. I am off to bed.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Call the vet. Pica is not uncommon for dogs. My 2 and a 1/2 year old likes to eat her own feces, which isn’t easy for her as I bag it as soon as she dumps. She’s been doing it since she was a pup, my vet in PA and in FL had me try the powder that makes it taste bad – didn’t stop her at all. Its an infrequent issue now as the only time she manages to do this is when I’m paying attention to my older dog so I can bag her mess up.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Awww…rats! Well, maybe I’ll have to do the same. Long day today, long day tomorrow.
Adam L Silverman
@Barb2: The Birchers are in that chain of transmission, but like the race realists, were attempting to put a polite veneer on their extremism.
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: NOOOOOOO.
One of my nieces has a really vicious Pom. She jokes that it’s reverting to her ancestry — to which I reply “only if it’s a socialist who gets run out of Rügen”.
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: Just asking…
Chris T.
@Viva BrisVegas:
Yes, but it’s actually worse than that. It’s bad for the 0.1%, and the 0.01%. Some of them even realize this, but not enough.
Well, I say “bad for”, but it’s more accurate to say “suboptimal for”. The 0.1 and 0.01 percenters are doing fine. It’s just that they would do even better if they were not killing the economy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: @Miss Bianca: Well, soon and stuff.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: The thought of a substance that makes dog poop actually *taste bad* to dogs is a brain- *and* stomach-curdler. I thank God for small mercies that at least my dogs confine themselves to turkey and coyote poop!
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: My first dog didn’t like raw vegetables. Have you tried putting raw vegetables in the poop to keep them from eating it?
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: Heh.
Alas, I have an early and long day tomorrow, too. Sleep well, all!
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: I was quite looking forward to being schooled on the *proper* interpretations of Machiavelli and Calvin…
divF
@FlyingToaster: I don’t quite, but I’m a mathematician of Italian descent, so I have all the guilt and hear all the jokes.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I have no idea what the deal is. She’s done it, or would if I was quick to pick up, ever since I brought her home from the foster family’s. But since she’s a happy, healthy, 50 lbs muscle bound baby I’ve got few complaints. Now if I could just get her over being so skittish around other people we’d be golden.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: I just ask that people have actually read them. Actual written words seem to differ from popular perception. Proper interpretation be damned. Read the source material is all I ask.
Chris T.
@Miss Bianca: I admit I have not read Machiavelli’s work straight through, plus I’m sure it loses something in the translation from the original
ItalianRussianKlingon, but from the bits I have read, it’s accurate, based on real observation of real people and real motivations. Calvinism, I’m much less sure about. :-)Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major:
I…uh…my mind is going weird places when presenting with this – dare I say, bouquet? Or do I mean cornucopia? – of images.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: Good, then it worked.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I think that was intended for me. My dog loves raw veggies, especially carrots.
Adam L Silverman
Overnight open thread is up. With music!
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: I have wound thee up, it seems, and now thou dost let fly.
I have actually read both these authors before, but not recently, and not comprehensively in any case. We’re certainly not on such terms that I can drag one or t’other out from my mental theater lobby like Woody Allen with Marshall McLuhan. If *you* are, well…?
Calming Influence
@redshirt: I’ve noticed that the elect tend to buy 20 pound bags of fortune cookies.at Costco.
redshirt
@Calming Influence: Why not focus your luck?
Chris T.
@Calming Influence: Those are people who think they run the country…
SgrAstar
More Machiavelli! More Calvin! This thread is so much fun. Too bad all the commenters are going to bed. :(
amk
Lot of words to essplain away white supremacy and entitlement.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Miss Bianca: One example of something people generally get wrong about Machiavelli is that he never said, “The end justifies the means.” That’s a mistranslation. What he actually said is, “The end is the only way the means can be justified.” His point wasn’t that anything you do is ethical so long as your goal is ethical; rather, it was that, if you end in failure, your methods weren’t sufficient.
It’s important that he was speaking strictly about the behavior of states, not individuals. For the state, the need for survival transcended all other considerations. If the state collapsed, or was destroyed, then it rulers were failures. It’s a misreading of him to take the things he wrote about the morality of states and apply them to the morality of individuals, save in the limited case of an autocrat who effectively was the state.
It’s also worth noting that Niccolo Machiavelli wasn’t very Machiavellian in his own conduct.
Mart
@Omnes Omnibus: I swapped books with a roommate while moving out of college. He had a couple Camus books. I read “The Little Prince” and enjoyed it a great deal. (Have no idea about the specifics, it was 36 years ago…) Thought the roommates copy of “The Plague” would be equally entertaining. Two hours after finishing I broke into a 104 degree fever, wife calling the Doctor on a Saturday, and dumping me into a bathtub filled with ice. That Camus boy could write. (I called him KAMUS until I was very loudly corrected.)
? Martin
@redshirt:
I don’t think it can in this case. This year is the test of that theory and it’s clearly failing. The reason is that whites in the US aren’t unified in maintaining a white supremacy state. There’s just too many of us refusing to go along and this is a place where relatively strong state governments work in our favor. The Confederacy can pass all of the voter suppression laws they want, but CA and MA aren’t about to go along. Minorities remaining in power requires constant effort. It’s a place where Democrats can be obstructionists and win – just ask RBG.
I think 2016 will end the southern strategy as a viable national strategy for the GOP. This should kill it. That doesn’t mean GOP voters are going to go along, but it should mean that the future GOP will look more like Romney and less like Trump/Huckabee/Perry, etc. As for those on the outside of the strategy, they’ll continue it at the state level, and I suspect any number will move to various forms of soft or violent terrorism. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the gun movement has been getting increasingly strident as the political strategy has waned. They won’t go that quietly.
But the autopsy after this election will be that the GOP is bankrupt in terms of national strategy. Continuing this is simply impossible if they have any self-preservation as a national party.
Morat
@Chris T.: I don’t think it *is* bad for the elite. If they have more money but society becomes more equal, they are richer in material goods, but poorer in power and status. And for the very wealthy, more material goods are pretty irrelevant aside from status keeping, which doesn’t make a difference if all of the super rich get richer.
Consider a ski vacation. Someone who can afford to fly first class to Aspen to stay in a five star resort would have to get a *lot* richer to be able to afford to charter a jet to their Alpine chalet, and yet probably wouldn’t be much happier with the latter. How much happier is someone with a $1m Ferrari over a $180k Ferrari? Not much. I mean, really, it extends downwards, IIRC happiness goes up with income pretty much until you hit “comfortable middle class” and then stops.
But an unequal society means that people are for rent. If you want to be the lord of the manor, that requires a lot of poor people with very few options. Even Edwardian factory jobs at 10-12 hours a day with one day off a week were far more appealing than most of the service jobs; maids used to work 14-16 hour days and got one day off a *month*. And they lost their jobs if they got married or had kids. So if you have Downton Abbey fantasies, then stagnation is good.
Fewer opportunities for the poor also means less social mobility, i.e. the children of the rich are more likely to stay rich. They won’t have to compete for jobs or acceptance to elite schools with the grasping lower orders. The poor smart kid can perhaps become an artist or a doctor dependent on the rich, but no threat to their position. On pure short-sighted self-interest, that’s good for them.
Shalimar
@srv: The speech is fresher than Reagan, who is still dead. Still, good for him to resurrect his political potential after that horrible “Medicare will be the end of freedom in America” start.
sherparick
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: In a sense, in this struggle, there is no original thought. What is the young “Alt-right” about after all is to use ideology of “white” supremacy (and “white” is very much a cultural, tribal, and political concept) to maintain and enlarge the supremacy and power of the rentier and managerial class to rule over the rest of us. (Whatever his true wealth, Trump, like Romney, McCain, the Bushes, and Reagan before him is a very wealthy man and his new campaign manager, Steve Bannon, is a “hugely” wealthy man (made rich as an investment banker and the money that fired hosed into entertainment and media in he 1990s – love those copyright protections and royalties which of course are pure creations of Government and enforced by Government). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Bannon
Every generation will face this struggle, even if the forms are different. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln stated it in Alton, Illinois (across the Mississippi from St. Louis and where 20 years before Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered for printing anti-slavery editorials – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah_Parish_Lovejoy), at the close of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates with these lines:
“….That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
— October 15, 1858 Debate at Alton, Illinois
Lurker Extraordinaire
@Mary G: Just bought a pair of new running shoes yesterday (from Brooks, in nice respectable-like purple and teal), and saw the same shoes you are talking about at both The Finish Line and at Dick’s. I didn’t care for them, either. I’m more fond of Bolt’s black and gold numbers, or my red, white, and blue running spikes I had moons ago for high school track.
sherparick
@Villago Delenda Est: I would sadly add that it was the “Enlightenment,” or the Conservative members of it like Edmund Burke, as Corey Robin has articulated in the “The Reactoinary Mind.” that gave birth to the ideas of “racism” and white supremacy, as a way of justifying first slavery, and then the exploitation of industrial labor and women as way of justifying not recognizing these persons as full human beings. https://newrepublic.com/article/91901/reactionary-mind-corey-robin. When these people demand their rights, the response is rage.
As Alan Wolfe writes in his review of Robin’s book: “…Conservatives are unified, and united in their rage. Their most passionate hate is directed at those they believe were assigned by God or nature to second-class status but still insist on their full rights as human beings.”
Eric U.
@Villago Delenda Est: the Republicans when they heard about Hitler: “finally, someone who says what I’m thinking”
NickM
@Adam L Silverman: My mind is a little blown that there’s a powder that makes poop taste bad. Makes me wonder what I’ve been missing all these years….
Chris
@Morat:
Superbly summarized. I, too, think this is key to understanding the rich: at that level, wealth has become an abstraction that ceases to mean anything. They’re much more interested in less tangible things like status and power.
1,000 Flouncing Lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Grover Norquist is a fan. The Unending Revolution thing.
1,000 Flouncing Lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)
@Jeffro: Is that dolt-rightists or dole-rightists?
Ruviana
@Calming Influence: So so late to this thread but David Neiwart’s first book has a lot on them.
Jacel
Thank you, Richard for these many words and the deep thought and real experience that is packed into them. I have often cited your writing here on insurance as some of the clearest explanations of anything by anybody.
Stan
@Mart: Camus did not write ‘The Little Prince’; that was Saint Exuperey. Who, by the way, was killed flying a recon F-5 in WW2.
Dog Mom
@Miss Bianca: I have a beagle with Addison’s disease and hypothyroidism, but medicated and doing well. Poop, dirt, occasional binges on the TP and lately great interest in the fertilizer bag on the from porch – apparently the very stinky poultry manure and bone meal make it delectable.
Miss Bianca
@Dog Mom: She does have a thyroid problem so maybe I need to get her meds dosage upped? Thanks for the input!
No One You Know
@Adam L Silverman: One stop shopping!