2. One response to the problem @mattyglesias outlines (that any true history of a nation's founding would have to confront horrific crimes) is to myth-make. This is often done in an unconscious spirit but there are also major strands of conservative thought that advocates it
3. I think Leo Strauss' emphasis on esoteric/exoteric distinction, along with the Platonic tradition of the Noble Lie explains why Strauss encouraged his students to write edifying studies of the founders & Locke, even though Strauss' own heart was with ancients.
4. James Burnham, a Trostskyist turned W.F. Buckley mentor, came at politics from a different tradition (Machiavellianism) than Strauss. But Burnham also (influenced by Georges Sorel idea of social mythology) believed fictions were needed to hold society together.
5. Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition, 1959: "In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of Cities were known to be gods or demigods." In other words, good societies are bound together by mythical foundings.
6. All these issues were played out in the great but problematic Simpson's episode Lisa the Iconoclast. Lisa discovers that town founder Jebediah Springfield was in fact a vile pirate. Town resists her discovery so she embraces the lie en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_…
7. This is tangential but a large strand of rightwing thought in last century (the line from Jung to Campbell to Peterson) has pursued the argument that myths are essential for social life, It's not the natural law argument of past but explicit embrace of myth.
8. But contra Strauss, Burnham & Lisa Simpson, I'm not sure that a noble lie is necessary. It's my democratic conviction that people are smart enough to have a complicated patriotism, that acknowledges both the achievements and crimes of the past.
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1. "What a minute," yo might ask, "Isn't Milei a self-proclaimed libertarian, even an anarcho-capitalist who who wants to abolish the state? How can he be using police power to repress free speech & protests?" Well, the history of anarcho-capitalism has the answers.
2. The term anarcho-capitalism was coined by Murray Rothbard, this elfin looking guy, tweaking an earlier formulation by his friend Karl Hess (a Goldwater speechwriter turned anti-war activist). Rothbard was a pioneer in coopting language of anarchy for authoritarianism
3. Rothbard was politically all over the map, at various points allying himself with Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, New Left historical revisionists like William Appleman Williams, the Maoist Peace & Freedom Party, the Koch bros, Pat Buchanan
1. Fun fact: New Criticism was an outgrowth of a group called The Fugitives or Southern Agrarians. Their governing ideology was a celebration of hierarchical & traditional societies like the pre-Civil War south & pre-industrial Europe. Guess what they thought of Blacks & Jews?
2. This is a complicated story but the New Critics were Southern white reactionaries who idealized pre-industrial life & Christian hegemony, whitewashed slavery, and embraced formalism in criticism as a way of exalting an idealized order untouched by historical change.
3. It's kind of hard to place the New Critics in terms of contemporary politics because they were both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist, seeing industrialization as a falling off. And their critiques of capitalism & industrialization have real force & value.
I've literally been reading racists right-wingers (notably Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan) since Yglesias was in kindergarten. It's a big part of the work I do. Yet I somehow manage to avoid praising them as interesting parts of the discourse even as analyze their work.
The key thing here is that Yglesias thinks of the revanchist & racist right as part of his universe of discourse, people who are wrong on some stuff but worth engaging with. By contrast, for him left & left-liberals beyond the pale.
"He's clearly quite racist! But...." There's always a but.
1. Oppenheimer, Barbie and the contradictions of German-Jewish whiteness: Notes for an essay. (Jack Kirby will make a cameo here).
2. What's the real thread unifying the Barbenheimer phenomenon besides the coincidence of an opening date. I'd say both films are about the fraught experience of the children of immigrants in putatively melting pot society.
3. J. Robert Oppenheimer: of German-Jewish descent, huge success in his field, brought low by national security establishment. Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, of Polish-Jewish descent, huge success in her field, brought low by IRS.
1. While researching Young Americans for Freedom I came across what is, I think I can say this confidently, the worst music every sung by humans: the ersatz folk songs belted out by young rightwingers in 1960s in a desperate attempt to copy the folk revival.
2. This music is evidence of the strong anxiety created by the rise of the counterculture & New Left, which the right felt had to matched by an counter-attack. Janet Greene, for example, was often touted as the right's answer to Joan Baez.
3. This story has it all: White Christian Nationalism, neo-Nazis, domestic terrorism, the GOP, and a ventriloquist dummy. Hard to imagine any terrorism worse than the music though.
1. The obvious reason why this strategy of "progressive policy" denuded of class solidarity wont work is that the rich have intense class solidarity, which is why liberal rich are always outgunned in numbers & intensity by right-wing rich. For every Soros there are 100 Kochs.
2. You often hear this in liberal & even left-liberal circles: "why can't liberal billionaires fund X" (X being a left counterpart to Fox News or The Federalist Society or ALEC. The answer is there are very few liberal billionaires & they are generally committed to status quo.
3. There's also this. The rich who involved with center-left politics tend to have agendas that are the opposite of pursuing "progressive politics" (unless you have the most anemic possible progressive agenda).