So I'm seeing the same set of reactions to the line "this isn't what America is" which is to respond with the obvious truth that...well, yes it is.

The United States has been lots of things, good and bad and this sad moment is one of them.

But I think that misses the point. 1/
I was struck, in reading Andrew Wolpert's Remembering Defeat (2001), in how central the act of communal redefinition was to restoring the Athenian democracy in the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants. 2/
In speech after speech, inscription after inscription, that same formula - 'that is/isn't what we are' - recurs. The 'real Athens,' speakers insisted, was the one that had lived in exile, the one that had remained committed to the democracy. Not the Thirty. 3/
And I know that can feel like whitewashing the history. Wolpert notes that in some sense it was, that obviously there must have been a great many former collaborators with the Thirty in those Athenian assemblies and juries who were being told 'what they were' was democrats. 4/
But that exercise in self-definition was prescriptive, not descriptive and I think that is too powerful a message for us to give up.

We, not the insurrectionists, not the neo-Confederates, *we* are America, and we get to decide what America is today. 5/
And there is tremendous power in redefining the core attributes of a community.

People want to fit in! They want to belong.

Succeeding in redefining what we 'are' in that vague, metaphysical sense can exert a real pull on what people *do.* 6/
And that's the light that I think efforts by leaders to 'define out' our worst elements should be seen in. Not as an effort in white-washing, but an effort in forward-looking group definition.

Because 'we are' exerts a stronger pull on the human mind than 'you should.' 7/
Does that change what America was yesterday? No. Obviously. I'm a historian, I believe in the importance of the past. Nor should past crimes and failures be forgotten.

But I draw from the Athenian example the importance of defining ourselves so as to change our future. end/8

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More from @BretDevereaux

6 Jan
Since y'all wanted me to write about the silly idea of the 'universal warrior' and warrior vs. soldier dichotomy, and it came up in the context of Steven Pressfield's silly video...I am now watching his video series.

Y'all do not know the pains I go through to educate the public
Seriously, he opens by treating Plutarch's Sayings of Spartan Women entirely uncritically as a representation of Spartan culture pre-490.

That is the very first thing he does and it causes me physical pain.
Also, he's calling Sparta a warrior culture, which...I hate Sparta. A lot. I am on record on this point.

But even I would contend that the Spartans were soldiers, not warriors.
Read 39 tweets
4 Jan
This thing!

Sanctions have their uses (mostly actually as a diplomatic tool for bloc-building, I'd argue), but as a means of suasion, they really only work on issues an adversary considers relatively unimportant.
That said, I think there is a tendency to confuse sanctions-as-suasion vs. sanctions-as-economic-warfare (not being made by @EmmaMAshford here, to be clear), because we often pretend we're doing the former when we're really doing the later.
"We are going to intentionally crater the economy of X so they have less resources to do Y" is a fairly reasonable strategic maneuver, but not a very politic one given that
1) the pain falls on regular people and
2) admitting the goal is essentially admitting to hostilities.
Read 4 tweets
17 Dec 20
I am extraordinarily confused by the number of non-PhD-havers in certain media outlets who proclaim with absolute certainty that among the PhD-having-intelligentsia, using the title 'Dr.' for PhDs (and Ed.Ds) is somehow gauche.

It's not, that's stupid. 1/8
Look - do academics go around the office calling their colleagues 'Dr. so-and-so'? No, because this isn't a Jane Austen novel (if only because we're not that witty) and we don't say Mr. or Ms. in casual conversation either. 2/8
But when writing a formal letter, or a cold email, or introducing someone's talk or any other situation where you'd use 'Mr.' or 'Ms.' we absolutely use Dr. for PhD-havers (and EdD-havers!).

It is not gauche, it is normal and failing to do so is a bit of a faux pas. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
8 Dec 20
My own take for why this is a problem has to do less with the abilities of any particular SecDef or fears about the increasing politicization of the military and more to do with long-term norms about control and direction. 1/14
There is a trap and it is relatively easy to slide into where the normative assumption (among the public and elites) is that civilian leaders ought not interfere with military leaders due to the latter's superior expertise. 2/14
That risk is particularly acute in a society which generally assigns high moral qualities to service personnel and low moral qualities to politicians (as we do). There is already a lot of 'if only the politicians would let the generals do the job' popular discourse. 3/14
Read 14 tweets
5 Dec 20
It's time for a long twitter thread on the nature and limits of the evidence for the ancient world!

As you may be aware, compared to even something like the European Middle Ages (much less the modern period) the evidence for the ancient world is really very limited!

1/lots
Because the evidence for the ancient world is so limited, it is often necessary when writing narrative histories for regular people to scaffold around known facts to fill in some of the blanks.

Obviously this has risks and good scholars signal when they are doing it. 2/xx
But a lot of times, when you don't know the evidence, the difference between the fact-supported pillar and the guess-work-supported lintel isn't clear, especially if the lintel is the point of the argument and thus directly asserted as the conclusion of the pillars. 3/
Read 53 tweets
25 Nov 20
Ancient Near Eastern forms of monarchy getting oversimplified every freakin' time: Image
No one:

Absolutely no one:

That One Student: "Oh, people back then thought all of the kings were living gods so they had UNLIMITED POWER!"

Me: Sigh. Let's start back at the beginning...
Even including Egypt, most ANE kings did not have pretensions of divinity. Especially - say it with me now -

👏 Achaemenid👏 Great👏 Kings👏 Weren't 👏Living 👏Gods. 👏

And yes, I literally have my in-person classes chant that back to me to make the point.
Read 4 tweets

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