The thesis of the End of History is simply that there's not going to be a next stage that resolves all contradictions. The liberal democratic state is the terminus. You can revert from it but you cannot progress beyond it.
We abolished serfdom, slavery, aristocracy, and monarchy but will not abolish wage labor. Nor will we abolish differences in ability between individuals or the propensity of culture to generate differential outcomes.
The attempt to do the latter without doing the former is the task of what I call "the successor ideology."
There is a singular pathos to those who committed themselves to Marxism AFTER 1989
But what recent trends reveal is that Marx's original intuition -- that the new society would emerge from out of the post-industrial one is being borne out not by Marxist but by a non-economic redistribution of status and recognition that is core to the ideological succession
Automation, AI, and re-engineering humanity through genetic manipulation all present speculative scenarios for the transcendence of the species-being culminating in liberal democracy. But they remain highly speculative.
And even in a world transformed by these marvelous appurtenances, I suspect we will continue to be governed by the drives endemic to our creaturely natures: to our desire for food and sex and the esteem of other human creatures
The WEIRD personality profile shows how far a society can progress through systematized idealism (via Christianity and its successors) to eschew those underlying determinants of human conduct -- not very much
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I think the polls will be proven right and the fevered speculation about post-election chaos will be proven wrong
The thing about democracy is that it is ultimately controlled by elites who interpret the national narrative and govern in accordance with that interpretation. The Trump spasm was a temporary aberration.
Whatever we can persuade a majority to vote for is what is. In this case, “had enough of that dude” is the thing.
So interesting how noting that it was once OK to do something ended Kelly’s career while actually doing the thing when it was OK had no negative repercussions at all.
It’s deeper and weirder than mere partisan hypocrisy.
Something to do with violating the “we have always been at war with Eastasia” mandate in explicit terms rather than merely being on tape enacting the contrary in a past that can formally disappeared even as the tapes air
Iirc, she was never cut out for soft focus daytime TV and never going to succeed in that role. She excelled at annihilating invective.
The laptop story seems almost deliberately fake sounding — almost like they were trying to bait the tech platforms into treating it as disinformation...
I’m referring here to the story of how it came into Giuliano’s hands
While the emails were always unlikely to change anyone’s minds on their vote, tech censorship is where the GOP is pivoting as one of its major issues
We need but no longer receive unsparing but non-tendentious (not in the service of political partisanship or activist causes) accounts of the world
What truth-seeking individuals are forced to do is digest various tendentious accounts of the world and average them out to create a functional mean
This is a kind of activity that we do on our own and in small groups of sensible, sensitive, and informed friends who bring to bear their understanding of a range of different disciplines.
Bill Clinton; born to a single mother in Arkansas, now worth $100 million; Steve Bing, inherited $600 million, committed suicide with net worth under $300,000 after joining Clinton's Billionaire's Boys Club.
Not ascribing a cause-effect relationship to these two trajectories, just noting the concurrence and the fatal attraction of the adventurer on his way up and the scion on his way down.
The historian who took to Politico to air her concerns did so because she shared the goals of the project but felt that factual scrupulosity was necessary to their attainment.