The NYT, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal continue to run ads on Twitter to this day...in the midst of horrific attack on the ADL by Musk and his zombified attack dogs...
This tells us all we need to know about the inexcusable failure by mainstream media to function as the 4th rail of democracy.
For all its failings, Substack enables newsletters such as this one to be a clarion voice of brutal truths.
A lot of great points. I strongly advise that you also reference the superb analysis of Professor Timothy Snyder, both in the podcast Timothy Snyder Speaks, and in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. He explains brilliantly that autocrats push the type of nostalgic mythology that you discuss.
This is great. I will be applying it in the current fight against religious RW extremist that are trying to close down our library over LGBT content. The free speech content/polarization parts really spoke. Thank you!
I read Heather Cox Richardson daily and I love her, but I think lately she is falling more and more into the nostalgia camp as she talks often about how Biden is trying to return us to steadier economic days and restore us to someplace we used to be. Perhaps this is partly why her appeal is so widespread. I long for better days since 45, but when I realistically look back in time, America has not been good to me and my working class family. Perhaps there was a sliver of time in there when life was looking up, when unions were strong and women and African Americans were gaining rights and power, but a short decade the 1970s were. Reagan and Gingrich and the GOP and the theocrats in that party got right to dismantling all that beginning in the early 1980s. So many "centrist" Dems have stopped things that would have helped families like mine. They stopped M4A and more. My own party threw me under the bus in so many ways. Yet, I am forced to keep voting for their nonsense in the ridiculous political system we have which pits one party against another with little to no chance of other parties winning. Instead, people like Sanders are called spoilers.
Even so, this blog seems to avoid the effect racism has had, and still continues to have, on American discourse. I too read Heather's blog, in which she has become one of the many on Substack who try to elucidate the continuum of America's history. And basically, most of our history is rooted in the racism that came from christianity and slavery. I've not seen Heather touting the good ol' days although I think she admires the racist and misogynistic Founding Fathers a bit too much.
I agree that America skews conservative. “Ordered liberty” is what the founders aimed to promote. Slavery was a heinous part of the compromise they struck to form the nation. That fact dogs us still and we have not finished addressing it. But the ideals articulated by the founders are hard to beat. We need to implement them more fully.
Hypocrisy lives in every age. Racism seems obviously indefensible to our age - and it is - but human history is full of imperfection and our age too is full of hypocrisy. No one, even the self-righteous, is immune.
That compromise was repugnant. But without it there would have been no United States of America. Civil war was not inevitable. Slave holders insisted on it. Once begun, that war needed total defeat of slaving to save the country. These are brutal facts, I agree, and we must face them squarely as a nation.
I think that there are several psychological factors at play here, as you touch on with reference to nostalgia being a component of human emotion. One factor is the nature of memory. An advisor of mine told me that in his view the best way to think about memory was to see it as creative destruction. People are not recorders of data, sensory inputs, or experiences. Instead we are synthesizers of experience, which depends on creating memories that coherently, but are characterized by a good deal of specific information being lost. There are numerous books and articles that describe this in terms of creating stories, or showing cognitive biases, etc. My point here is that memory for a halcyon past is filled with factual information lost and is subject to reinforcement by repetition (either internally or externally generated).
In the case of nostalgia, I think this dovetails with a second factor, namely survival. The misremembered past is appealing by virtue of the fact that we have survived it. The future offers no such comfort. Of course nostalgia works more soothingly for those whose social status means that they survived comparative advantage. But, even for those who don’t, the past is less threatening than what is to come.
Thank you for this. Right now, I’m listening to audo of Kurt Anderson’s book, “Evil Geniuses”, which combines cultural and political analysis to go into detail about when, where and why America began putting nostalgia (worship of the past) over interest in the new - starting in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with “Happy Days” and all that. It is a kind of cultural attempt to escape dealing with contemporary realities. And yes, it absolutely, if largely unconsciously, reinforces MAGA and other right wing political movements.
Evil Geniuses is a very good book. His previous book (Fantasy Land-I think that is the title) is also quite good and deals with the broader context of US history as a whole.
But seriously: What drives me crazy about the use of "polarization" is its epistimological and moral tone deafness. If I say the world is round, and you say it's flat, we're not "polarized." The metaphor of polarization depends on both poles being equally (if oppositely) "charged"--which, in the case of politics, means both sides must have some equal validity as regards facts. Polarization requires differing *opinions.* But the right has been lying to the public for--well, forever, but much more so since the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and rise of Fox News. What people on the right now believe to be true is a stew of lies, myths, and slurs. That's not polarization. That's one side being gaslighted and brainwashed, and centrist and left media and politicians should call it out for what it is.
"What people on the right now believe to be true ..."
I don't buy the idea that the MAGAs "believe" the lies they are bein fed by Trump, Fox, etc -- they simply embrace the lies to "own the libs". I don't think these people are stupid so much as they are just bad people.
It's probably a combination of the two. We say that a MAGA would burn down his own house if it would make the liberal next door cough. But I don't think the Jan. 6 rioters were doing all that just to own the libs. They really thought they were stopping a steal.
You may be right, but a few hundred people storming the Capitol is not representative of the millions who slavishly support Trump. These millions are the people I'm referring to.
My one complaint about Zimmer is that, since I assume English is his second language, it bugs me that his writing in English is better than that of most people for whom English is their first, and often only, language. Of course, he's not a better writer than ME. But I couldn't write a sentence of German if my life depended on it.
Nostalgia for a past paradise that never was helps not at all, I agree. But neither does the utopian hope that we can impose perfection now. People need to talk in good faith and honestly. Demonizing those we oppose makes for warfare, not politics. Compromise is always hard, but must be hammered out.
What exactly is the acceptable "compromise" do you think between, "I don't think gay and trans people should be allowed to continue to exist in this country" and "I think gay and trans people should be allowed to exist in this country and have their basic human and civil rights?"
We also need to contend with the fact that the Republican party in this country has dealt in falsehoods like "trickle down economics" as policy for decades now, and many of those falsehoods are clearly undermined by the data and real world experience we've had of the outcomes of those policies.
If one person's opinion is based in obvious fantasies, conspiracies, and false narratives, and the other's in hard facts borne out of the data surrounding the situation/issue... why/how would a compromise between their positions actually be "good?"
There's no way to acceptable compromise with people who think chanting "Jews will not replace us!" in the street is something "fine people on both sides" do. Their position is a complete nonstarter.
I don't go out of my way to demonize these people, but when one party is clearly ready to destroy democracy to maintain power, THAT IS WARFARE. Democrats are expected to keep giving some concession that these people "thought/think they had a good reason for what they did." No, I'm sorry, there are lines that you don't get to cross and then still act like you're the victim. This is the narcissist playbook over and over and over again. They get to lie, abuse, incite violence, and at the end of the day they also expect us to also blame ourselves for why they did these things. It's ludicrous and insulting.
I refuse to accept this "both sides" kind of narrative when the actual situation is christo-fascists on one hand trying to subvert the will and the rights of everyone else, and then normal people who think democracy is worth saving and if they're lucky they might also get you student loan relief, and affordable housing and healthcare.
No one on the left is out there saying we only want a better society for "people like us." We want a better society for everyone, and that's even including the billionaires who don't seem to realize their blind greed is inviting a guillotine solution to these problems more and more everyday as the problems just keep getting worse. :P
Well, I agree that compromise on basic civil rights and the rule of law should be “off the table.” They should be non-negotiable. I agree that GOP lately has operated in a largely fact-free or counterfactual way. But on economic and social issues, and more generally on the best ways to implement our high ideals, I believe we have both room and need for honest discussion and good faith compromise. Civility is a good thing, I think.
And therein lies the problem, because only one of our current political parties is actually operating in anything approaching good faith.
The idea of democrats having to be civil, while the Republicans think any means are justified by their desired ends reminds me of a time I went on a long road trip to meet up with my family on vacation. My brother said something very rude and unnecessary to my Mom. I responded with, "You know, you don't actually have to say everything that pops into your head. Sometimes you can just be an asshole within the confines of your own mind and spare the rest of us."
And then my Mom told ME that I should just let it go, to keep the peace so we could all have a nice time together. There's a complete unwillingness to contend with the actual source of the conflict, because like Trump, my brother is a charming narcissist. :P
This is the same dynamic that keeps playing out in this country. Republicans push the envelope to further undermine our rule of law and democracy, and democrats are supposed to remain civil and give them pardons and keep treating them as a legitimate political party. Gee, I can't imagine why their behavior continues to escalate instead of be reformed. /s
The GOP has been lying to the people for decades. So there's that. Lying to people shouldn't be something the Democrats should have to refute. It doesn't work anyway. People obviously don't mind being lied to.
Honey, I'm going to demonize the fascist because they are very, very bad people. They want to take YOUR rights away from you, too. Coddling them is how we got into this hellscape we're in now. Your speaking from white, male privilege🤮 Perfectly fine with coddling and appeasing them because they haven't come for your rights yet...
Did I? It's the fascists who thrive on the inequitable systems they created. Giving them a voice in any government was idiotic. The conservatives are and have always been the fascists yet we're expected to compromise with them? No. That never works. Never. But our species doesn't learn. Even the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress right now aren't pushing back against the GOP forcefully enough, under the guise of bipartisanship we will lose our democracy.
Yes. I agree the current GOP is flirting with Fascism. I disagree that all conservatives are Fascists. That view threatens our democracy too. Americans have always disagreed. We are diverse in our views and interests. I think extremist and incendiary rhetoric is vile.
So how are we supposed to tell the difference between the conservatives who are fascists, and the ones who aren't when the fascists seem to keep winning their primaries, and even now after 4 indictments upwards of 64% of Republicans in recent polls think Trump is being treated unfairly by the DOJ and would vote for him to be president again?
My mom used to be a "moderate Conservative" and in recent years she has been on Facebook un-ironically regurgitating crazy nonsense about how we will "have to have a civil war if they keep trampling our rights." ... And by that she means the right to be openly hostile to LGBTQ+ people, minorities, immigrants, etc. Not the *actual* trampling of our rights that has recently taken bodily autonomy away from women and trans people, banning books, etc... the idea that her past privilege to be openly bigoted against people was actually a "right" and it's intolerable that she might have to see someone in a rainbow t-shirt and just mind her own damn business.
These people have a completely narcissistic and broken view of what actually constitutes liberty. They think their liberty is the only liberty that matters, and anyone else's doesn't... and that particular people shouldn't have rights at all. Implicit in their "Conservative" view of rights is this problematic Christo-Nationalist bent that means their opinions and beliefs should be the ones dictating everything for everyone.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time."
We're trying to pretend they weren't ALWAYS about upholding a status quo and systems of oppression that benefit a very few number of people at the cost of the common good and majority benefit. It's just now a little more obvious because they've gone past just upholding the current dysfunctional status quo to *actually* turning back the clock* on rights we've already achieved.
A radicalized right wants a radicalized left to war against. More than a third of eligible voters did not vote in 2016. Some of them are likely conservative but not fascist. Some are probably moderate liberals. Those voters will save America if they show up. Americans in general, I believe, are more moderate than extremist in either direction. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
The NYT, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal continue to run ads on Twitter to this day...in the midst of horrific attack on the ADL by Musk and his zombified attack dogs...
This tells us all we need to know about the inexcusable failure by mainstream media to function as the 4th rail of democracy.
For all its failings, Substack enables newsletters such as this one to be a clarion voice of brutal truths.
A lot of great points. I strongly advise that you also reference the superb analysis of Professor Timothy Snyder, both in the podcast Timothy Snyder Speaks, and in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. He explains brilliantly that autocrats push the type of nostalgic mythology that you discuss.
This is great. I will be applying it in the current fight against religious RW extremist that are trying to close down our library over LGBT content. The free speech content/polarization parts really spoke. Thank you!
I read Heather Cox Richardson daily and I love her, but I think lately she is falling more and more into the nostalgia camp as she talks often about how Biden is trying to return us to steadier economic days and restore us to someplace we used to be. Perhaps this is partly why her appeal is so widespread. I long for better days since 45, but when I realistically look back in time, America has not been good to me and my working class family. Perhaps there was a sliver of time in there when life was looking up, when unions were strong and women and African Americans were gaining rights and power, but a short decade the 1970s were. Reagan and Gingrich and the GOP and the theocrats in that party got right to dismantling all that beginning in the early 1980s. So many "centrist" Dems have stopped things that would have helped families like mine. They stopped M4A and more. My own party threw me under the bus in so many ways. Yet, I am forced to keep voting for their nonsense in the ridiculous political system we have which pits one party against another with little to no chance of other parties winning. Instead, people like Sanders are called spoilers.
Even so, this blog seems to avoid the effect racism has had, and still continues to have, on American discourse. I too read Heather's blog, in which she has become one of the many on Substack who try to elucidate the continuum of America's history. And basically, most of our history is rooted in the racism that came from christianity and slavery. I've not seen Heather touting the good ol' days although I think she admires the racist and misogynistic Founding Fathers a bit too much.
I agree that America skews conservative. “Ordered liberty” is what the founders aimed to promote. Slavery was a heinous part of the compromise they struck to form the nation. That fact dogs us still and we have not finished addressing it. But the ideals articulated by the founders are hard to beat. We need to implement them more fully.
Bullhooey. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/founding-fathers-and-slaveholders-72262393/
They were among the first of many racist hypocrites to govern in America.
Hypocrisy lives in every age. Racism seems obviously indefensible to our age - and it is - but human history is full of imperfection and our age too is full of hypocrisy. No one, even the self-righteous, is immune.
That's called making excuses for egregious behavior.
Historical perspective does not excuse but can sometimes help explain what people living much later find inexcusable.
That compromise was repugnant. But without it there would have been no United States of America. Civil war was not inevitable. Slave holders insisted on it. Once begun, that war needed total defeat of slaving to save the country. These are brutal facts, I agree, and we must face them squarely as a nation.
I think that there are several psychological factors at play here, as you touch on with reference to nostalgia being a component of human emotion. One factor is the nature of memory. An advisor of mine told me that in his view the best way to think about memory was to see it as creative destruction. People are not recorders of data, sensory inputs, or experiences. Instead we are synthesizers of experience, which depends on creating memories that coherently, but are characterized by a good deal of specific information being lost. There are numerous books and articles that describe this in terms of creating stories, or showing cognitive biases, etc. My point here is that memory for a halcyon past is filled with factual information lost and is subject to reinforcement by repetition (either internally or externally generated).
In the case of nostalgia, I think this dovetails with a second factor, namely survival. The misremembered past is appealing by virtue of the fact that we have survived it. The future offers no such comfort. Of course nostalgia works more soothingly for those whose social status means that they survived comparative advantage. But, even for those who don’t, the past is less threatening than what is to come.
Thank you for this. Right now, I’m listening to audo of Kurt Anderson’s book, “Evil Geniuses”, which combines cultural and political analysis to go into detail about when, where and why America began putting nostalgia (worship of the past) over interest in the new - starting in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with “Happy Days” and all that. It is a kind of cultural attempt to escape dealing with contemporary realities. And yes, it absolutely, if largely unconsciously, reinforces MAGA and other right wing political movements.
Evil Geniuses is a very good book. His previous book (Fantasy Land-I think that is the title) is also quite good and deals with the broader context of US history as a whole.
But seriously: What drives me crazy about the use of "polarization" is its epistimological and moral tone deafness. If I say the world is round, and you say it's flat, we're not "polarized." The metaphor of polarization depends on both poles being equally (if oppositely) "charged"--which, in the case of politics, means both sides must have some equal validity as regards facts. Polarization requires differing *opinions.* But the right has been lying to the public for--well, forever, but much more so since the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and rise of Fox News. What people on the right now believe to be true is a stew of lies, myths, and slurs. That's not polarization. That's one side being gaslighted and brainwashed, and centrist and left media and politicians should call it out for what it is.
"What people on the right now believe to be true ..."
I don't buy the idea that the MAGAs "believe" the lies they are bein fed by Trump, Fox, etc -- they simply embrace the lies to "own the libs". I don't think these people are stupid so much as they are just bad people.
What, you don't know that Q-Anon is Trump's propaganda arm?
It's probably a combination of the two. We say that a MAGA would burn down his own house if it would make the liberal next door cough. But I don't think the Jan. 6 rioters were doing all that just to own the libs. They really thought they were stopping a steal.
You may be right, but a few hundred people storming the Capitol is not representative of the millions who slavishly support Trump. These millions are the people I'm referring to.
My one complaint about Zimmer is that, since I assume English is his second language, it bugs me that his writing in English is better than that of most people for whom English is their first, and often only, language. Of course, he's not a better writer than ME. But I couldn't write a sentence of German if my life depended on it.
Brian Linn had a similar piece regarding military recruitment
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3239&context=parameters
Thank you for this and the original piece. I’ve been particularly disturbed by how Brooks is leaning into nostalgia about marriage that helps fuel regressive agendas. https://annelutzfernandez.substack.com/p/making-marriage-miserable-again
Nostalgia for a past paradise that never was helps not at all, I agree. But neither does the utopian hope that we can impose perfection now. People need to talk in good faith and honestly. Demonizing those we oppose makes for warfare, not politics. Compromise is always hard, but must be hammered out.
What exactly is the acceptable "compromise" do you think between, "I don't think gay and trans people should be allowed to continue to exist in this country" and "I think gay and trans people should be allowed to exist in this country and have their basic human and civil rights?"
We also need to contend with the fact that the Republican party in this country has dealt in falsehoods like "trickle down economics" as policy for decades now, and many of those falsehoods are clearly undermined by the data and real world experience we've had of the outcomes of those policies.
If one person's opinion is based in obvious fantasies, conspiracies, and false narratives, and the other's in hard facts borne out of the data surrounding the situation/issue... why/how would a compromise between their positions actually be "good?"
There's no way to acceptable compromise with people who think chanting "Jews will not replace us!" in the street is something "fine people on both sides" do. Their position is a complete nonstarter.
I don't go out of my way to demonize these people, but when one party is clearly ready to destroy democracy to maintain power, THAT IS WARFARE. Democrats are expected to keep giving some concession that these people "thought/think they had a good reason for what they did." No, I'm sorry, there are lines that you don't get to cross and then still act like you're the victim. This is the narcissist playbook over and over and over again. They get to lie, abuse, incite violence, and at the end of the day they also expect us to also blame ourselves for why they did these things. It's ludicrous and insulting.
I refuse to accept this "both sides" kind of narrative when the actual situation is christo-fascists on one hand trying to subvert the will and the rights of everyone else, and then normal people who think democracy is worth saving and if they're lucky they might also get you student loan relief, and affordable housing and healthcare.
No one on the left is out there saying we only want a better society for "people like us." We want a better society for everyone, and that's even including the billionaires who don't seem to realize their blind greed is inviting a guillotine solution to these problems more and more everyday as the problems just keep getting worse. :P
Thanks for stating how I feel. I tell this to my friends all the time! :)
Well, I agree that compromise on basic civil rights and the rule of law should be “off the table.” They should be non-negotiable. I agree that GOP lately has operated in a largely fact-free or counterfactual way. But on economic and social issues, and more generally on the best ways to implement our high ideals, I believe we have both room and need for honest discussion and good faith compromise. Civility is a good thing, I think.
"good faith"
And therein lies the problem, because only one of our current political parties is actually operating in anything approaching good faith.
The idea of democrats having to be civil, while the Republicans think any means are justified by their desired ends reminds me of a time I went on a long road trip to meet up with my family on vacation. My brother said something very rude and unnecessary to my Mom. I responded with, "You know, you don't actually have to say everything that pops into your head. Sometimes you can just be an asshole within the confines of your own mind and spare the rest of us."
And then my Mom told ME that I should just let it go, to keep the peace so we could all have a nice time together. There's a complete unwillingness to contend with the actual source of the conflict, because like Trump, my brother is a charming narcissist. :P
This is the same dynamic that keeps playing out in this country. Republicans push the envelope to further undermine our rule of law and democracy, and democrats are supposed to remain civil and give them pardons and keep treating them as a legitimate political party. Gee, I can't imagine why their behavior continues to escalate instead of be reformed. /s
The GOP has been lying to the people for decades. So there's that. Lying to people shouldn't be something the Democrats should have to refute. It doesn't work anyway. People obviously don't mind being lied to.
Honey, I'm going to demonize the fascist because they are very, very bad people. They want to take YOUR rights away from you, too. Coddling them is how we got into this hellscape we're in now. Your speaking from white, male privilege🤮 Perfectly fine with coddling and appeasing them because they haven't come for your rights yet...
Always punch Nazis.
Well, I am sure I did not advocate coddling Fascists or Nazis. They favor punching over discussion. I don’t. You misjudge me.
Did I? It's the fascists who thrive on the inequitable systems they created. Giving them a voice in any government was idiotic. The conservatives are and have always been the fascists yet we're expected to compromise with them? No. That never works. Never. But our species doesn't learn. Even the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress right now aren't pushing back against the GOP forcefully enough, under the guise of bipartisanship we will lose our democracy.
Yes. I agree the current GOP is flirting with Fascism. I disagree that all conservatives are Fascists. That view threatens our democracy too. Americans have always disagreed. We are diverse in our views and interests. I think extremist and incendiary rhetoric is vile.
So how are we supposed to tell the difference between the conservatives who are fascists, and the ones who aren't when the fascists seem to keep winning their primaries, and even now after 4 indictments upwards of 64% of Republicans in recent polls think Trump is being treated unfairly by the DOJ and would vote for him to be president again?
My mom used to be a "moderate Conservative" and in recent years she has been on Facebook un-ironically regurgitating crazy nonsense about how we will "have to have a civil war if they keep trampling our rights." ... And by that she means the right to be openly hostile to LGBTQ+ people, minorities, immigrants, etc. Not the *actual* trampling of our rights that has recently taken bodily autonomy away from women and trans people, banning books, etc... the idea that her past privilege to be openly bigoted against people was actually a "right" and it's intolerable that she might have to see someone in a rainbow t-shirt and just mind her own damn business.
These people have a completely narcissistic and broken view of what actually constitutes liberty. They think their liberty is the only liberty that matters, and anyone else's doesn't... and that particular people shouldn't have rights at all. Implicit in their "Conservative" view of rights is this problematic Christo-Nationalist bent that means their opinions and beliefs should be the ones dictating everything for everyone.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time."
We're trying to pretend they weren't ALWAYS about upholding a status quo and systems of oppression that benefit a very few number of people at the cost of the common good and majority benefit. It's just now a little more obvious because they've gone past just upholding the current dysfunctional status quo to *actually* turning back the clock* on rights we've already achieved.
A radicalized right wants a radicalized left to war against. More than a third of eligible voters did not vote in 2016. Some of them are likely conservative but not fascist. Some are probably moderate liberals. Those voters will save America if they show up. Americans in general, I believe, are more moderate than extremist in either direction. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
Racist and bigoted people need to be shamed and shunned. Full stop.