The idea that time is running out--that it was always, as I showed in my book, FREE ENTERPRISE: AN AMERICAN HISTORY, "five minutes to midnight"--is central to the existential framing of all backlashes. /2 yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…
So too was the idea that the rule of law was provisional, that certain people were not bound by its strictures. As one critic of the "recent revolutionary acts of Congress" said in 1868, they would "provoke on the part of those immediately affected by them violent resistance."/3
The claim that the natural order (or, the "traditional American way of life") is being inverted is central to the claim of crisis and and frames what I call "elite victimization."/4
As a critic of Reconstruction forthrightly said in 1866: “Then we had the influence of the General Government in our favor—now its whole power [is] wielded...with a fierceness and cruelty that can find no parallel in any previous period of our history...directed against us.”/5
The claims of "monstrous inversion" (as one critic of Reconstruction put it), the psychology of humiliation, the politics of existential emergency, and the threat of extralegal violence have long gone hand in hand in constituting backlash politics./6.
Enumerating the train of humiliations is another key element of backlash framing. For white Southerners in 1875 to complain about the "lacerations of untold tortures" suggests that projection is central as well./ 7
Via this projection, backlashers coopt the language of the oppressed. As one observer of the 1964 GOP convention noted, "the theme song of the whole convention seemed to be—we’re sick and tired—sick and tired of this, sick and tired of that, sick and tired of the other." /8
Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, she was "sick and tired or being sick and tired." /9
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This piece only hints at what might have been Moynihan's most lasting legacy: his pronouncement that the Reagan-era GOP had become the "party of ideas."/1 nytimes.com/2021/05/15/boo…
Personally, I don't find Moynihan's positing "the seeming incapacity of government to get anything right” to be a "great insight." Instead, I consider it part of the damaging denigration of government that mainstream politicians have only recently beginning to challenge./3
So much of the reporting not only assumes good faith on the part of Republicans, it ignores McConnell’s explicit policy of rejecting any major Biden initiative (as the GOP did with Obama), no matter how necessary or popular. The faux naiveté is maddening. /1
Here’s a good example: a passage taking as fact “the fiscal austerity….emerging within her own [Capito’s] party.” As Joe Biden might say, “Come on, Man!” /2
And then there is this passage, in which Capito’s complete inversion of recent history is quoted at length, with no context whatsoever—say about how Obama wasted six months for Republican moderates to sign onto the ACA which they, predictably, rejected as a bloc. /3
Throughout the Trump presidency, it wasn’t just his allies but the media that obsessively highlighted Trump’s mood and anger level. /1 washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Here’s an example about Trump being angry after losing the election. /2
When this piece came out, I tweeted that I hoped it would be the last article I would ever have to read about Trump’s mood. Was I ever wrong./3 washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
I find the zero-sum framing in the first two paragraphs of this column problematic. To say that many white workers felt that they "were left face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization" is not to say that this is true./1 nytimes.com/2021/05/05/opi…
It is doubtless the case that "many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside." But many other groups also bore the brunt of de-industrialization.../2
particularly since they had, until recently, been excluded from well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs and began to gain a foothold just as that sector began, for a variety of reasons, to implode./ 3
I question the framing and significant omissions in this profile of Kristi Noem, which doesn't even mention the misleading, deceitful story she told about the "death tax" that led to her rise to national prominence./1 nytimes.com/2021/05/02/us/…
Her story about how the estate tax adversely affected her family did not add up, although she and others continue to refer to it as justification for eliminating it./2 huffpost.com/entry/the-real…
Here's a portion of 2019 article by Noem in which she refers to to the impact of the "death tax" on her family./3
In my book, I argued that though the language of free enterprise "hung in a state of suspended animation," it became increasingly effective as the New Deal order weakened. Scott's speech suggests that this language may finally be past its sell-by date./1 usnews.com/news/politics/…
As I wrote, the free enterprise text remained remarkably stable from the 1930s onward, but the context did not. Whereas such language, though not new, seemed bold and exciting in the Age of Reagan, it seems stale and ineffectual in the current political moment./2
Free enterprise conservatism won out for a time by claiming the mantle of "common sense." Scott invoked common sense (twice) in his rebuttal, but what he offered was a litany free enterprise cliches: "big government waste," "job-killing tax hikes," "Washington schemes." /3