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Jeff Irvin Profile picture
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Aug 6 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The apocalyptic vision has been for centuries popular in the West; however, unlike Norman Cohn's observations about millenarianism and social dislocation in late medieval Europe, these modern millenarians accord more with Michael Barkun's relative social deprivation thesis.
However, unlike the real relative social deprivation of early nineteenth-century America, which Barkun highlights, modern millenarians are anxious about an imagined deprivation, which is really an anxiety over the loss of white Christian dominance in the United States.
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition a.co/d/hyjlXmS
Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s (New York State Series) a.co/d/460j3WP
Whatever might ail America, white Christian nationalism will never be the answer.
#EmptyThePews
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More from @JefferyIrvinPhD

Jeff Irvin Profile picture
Jul 30
"Americanism" rests on two bedrock principles: 1) Whiteness--better termed white supremacy, and 2) Christianity--ill-defined but with a heavy emphasis on a type of post-millenial political dominance. These bedrock principles dictate Americanism's political and economic ideology.
That Americanists claim to laud both democracy and a "free market" is belied by the lengths to which they often go to subvert both while still maintaining the fiction of the "self-made man" and the "rugged individualist".
The Americanist's view is that success--whether economic or political--cannot be achieved outside a society where whiteness and Christianity are not dominant. So, when a political-economy without their racial and religious conceits does work it is suspect; it is illegitimate.
Read 10 tweets
Jeff Irvin Profile picture
Jan 2, 2021
In a few years, when writers analyze the decade between 2010 and 2020, they'll mark the 2010 rise of the Tea Party as the beginning of @GOP political decline. It actually began much earlier than that, in the 1930s with their intransigent opposition to all change.
They will mark Kim Davis' refusal to obey #SCOTUS in 2014 as the moment Republicans chose anarchy over law and order, although the seeds were sown decades before with the election of Ronald Reagan.
And, they will point to January 6th, 2021, as the day the party of Lincoln chose autocracy over democracy in a last ditch effort to resuscitate the "white Christian Republic", the fevered dream antebellum southern ministers like Samuel Davies Baldwin.
Read 4 tweets
Jeff Irvin Profile picture
Jan 2, 2021
This video exemplifies the complicated problem with taking a moral stand and then arguing from there that legal, political, or "extra-legal" action should be taken, especially when you believe "the other" does not share your morality.
That Jesus and Satan are bandied about is evidence this is not really about freedom or serious questions about the accuracy of public health pronouncements. It's just about imposing your own moral universe on everyone else.
These people want to impose on everyone what the great writer Jim Harrison called "monomoralism". This is the idea that there is only one, narrowly defined moral worldview to which all should be forced to adhere. In the U.S. that monomoralism is largely Christianity.
Read 10 tweets
Jeff Irvin Profile picture
Jan 1, 2021
Ron06212876, the "rewriting" you speak of has been going on for decades.

When I was in grad school (mid-1990s) many of the "rewrites" you speak of were already orthodoxy in the history profession.
It takes decades for these ideas to be communicated outside of the academy and that communication is always haphazard, because most historians are mediocre public communicators and the amateurs tend to ignore the "nuances" of what professional historians consider paradigmatic.
A good "woke", middle-of-the-road work that integrates the work of professional historians is @jmeacham's The Soul of America. He is not a Ph.D. in history but he understands one crucial point of American history: that the U.S. has never dealt fully with its racist past.
Read 6 tweets
Jeff Irvin Profile picture
Dec 11, 2020
Reading a book right now and the writer used the word "recondite"--which I thought was an obscure way for them to get their point across. @adriandaub
Chapter two of "What Tech Calls Thinking" is all about platform building, the "medium becoming the message", and all the money to be made with just the delivery of "information". It makes me think of the modern oceanic carrying trade, and late nineteenth century railroads.
I'm a great admirer of the word "quotidian"--which is why I use it every day. 😁
Read 18 tweets
Jeff Irvin Profile picture
Dec 9, 2020
As I listened to Boris Johnson bellyaching about how the EU would treat them "unfairly" once they left the trading block it hit me: these people--let's call them "conservatives"--want greater economic arbitrage but always at someone else's expense, never their own.
Economic "dynamism" with a few rules they can bend to their advantage, or avoid altogether, is the conservative's aim. In short, #Brexit and the whole "conservative" zeitgeist revolves around the fundamental motivation of creating an environment in which it is easier to grift.
And, as they go about their grifting "conservatives" try to convince the populace that any lack of success among a majority is due to one's own personal failings, that it has nothing to do with a system engineered for their success, never yours.
Read 4 tweets

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