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Kerry 🇺🇸

Jan 18 • 11 tweets • 5 min read

https://twitter.com/kerry62189/status/1483311412697083907

Lol at "...he made a reference to Emerson--I don't know where Emerson talks about decentralization...but these ideas seemed radical to me."

soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/196…

https://twitter.com/kerry62189/status/1483311412697083907

Basically sounds like he wanted to be an old-school Republican. Which the Kennedys likely would have been had it not been for the anti-Catholic bias among MA Republicans at that time. Successful Dem. presidents usually incorporate some elements of old-school Republicanism.

"[RFK] found in Ralph Waldo Emerson's thesis of self-reliance the alternative to big government as a way to cure poverty."

publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-1862…

archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…

"Furthermore, Beran argues that by passing through the furnace of family tragedy, Kennedy had become both Greek and Emersonian."

That's a strange line.

The Beran book is "The Last Patrician." Will have to read it.

Schlesinger also got into it.

Lol, another "X is credited with coining this term in 1970, although Emerson actually used it 1842."

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More from @kerry62189

Kerry 🇺🇸

@kerry62189

Jan 19

From 2010, about Moynihan's letters to Nixon.

"In one form or another all of the major domestic problems facing you derive from the erosion of the authority of the institutions of American society. This is a mysterious process of which the most that can be said is that once it starts it tends not to stop."

"… All we know is that the sense of institutions being legitimate—especially the institutions of government—is the glue that holds societies together. When it weakens, things come unstuck"

Read 24 tweets

Kerry 🇺🇸

@kerry62189

Jan 19

1986: "...state Senate president [Billy] Bulger maintains one of the vital traditions of Massachusetts politics: Yankee baiting."

washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio…

"In an economic inversion of the traditional New Deal coalition, the Massachusetts Democratic Party has, over the past decade, increasingly become the party of affluent, liberal, middle-class suburbanites."

"Blue-collar white Catholics, once the mainstay of the Massachusetts Democratic coalition, have in large part been dealt out of the system. They vote in far fewer numbers than in the past, and their votes are no longer reliably Democratic, particularly in presidential contests."

Read 8 tweets

Kerry 🇺🇸

@kerry62189

Jan 18

https://twitter.com/kerry62189/status/1483321227586461701

What Emerson, Lincoln, et. al were *trying* to do was unify the country on a stable and ethical long-term basis. The end result was a philosophy that could at least theoretically include all Americans, North or South, black or white, etc.

https://twitter.com/kerry62189/status/1483321227586461701

This is why I'm appalled by the guilt-by-association politics like "southern strategy" that influential Democrats and some Republicans have promoted in recent decades. Reuniting with southerners was always the hope.

*As long as it was done on an ethical basis,* which it was, given the changes made related to the Civil Rights Movement, where Republicans had been front and center. To make that *itself* into a suspect or sinister thing was unforgivable given the history of the parties.

Read 12 tweets

Kerry 🇺🇸

@kerry62189

Jan 18

This is referring to RFK.

Also referring to RFK.
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…

JFK in 1958.

Read 14 tweets

Kerry 🇺🇸

@kerry62189

Jan 18

This is what I mean when I say the northern Democrat version of American history and political science is a persistent problem. It's especially destabilizing when deployed in MA, which it rarely was before the last decade.

masspoliticsprofs.org/2021/02/16/mas…

Major disconnect.

massgop.com/our-party/

The Atlantic in *2015*: "On election night, the news web site Boston.com ran the headline 'Dear America, Our Republicans Are Better Than Yours.'"

Read 17 tweets

Kerry 🇺🇸

@kerry62189

Jan 16

This is from 1992. It's not like DuBois downplayed the connection.

jstor.org/stable/27746506

Yes, because Emerson had already converted everyone who ran in these intellectual circles. But DuBois starts from the assumption that he is inherently in conflict with Emerson, because of the Hegelian interpretation of American history that had already become popular.

He was trying to save everyone else the trouble.

jstor.org/stable/363332

Read 5 tweets

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