At every moment of US history, reactionaries have been saying that immigration is out of control and that immigrants are lazy and dirty and ruining the country. Similarly, at every moment of US history, reactionaries have been saying that young people are lazy ...
... and don't work as hard as their elders. Similarly, at every moment of US history reactionaries have been saying that proper values & decency are under threat from intellectuals and libertines. Similarly, at every moment of US history, reactionaries have been saying ...
... that the US is under threat from other countries & that efforts at international cooperation are merely ruses to weaken the US. Similarly, at every moment of US history, reactionaries have been saying that they are being persecuted and treated unfairly by institutions.
Now, it is probably the case that reactionaries have been correct about some of these things in some instances. If you say the same thing all the time, just as a matter of probabilities you're eventually going to be correct on occasion. Stopped clock, etc.
But at the same time, if you always say the same thing, it's a good bet that you're not saying it in response to a careful empirical assessment of circumstances. It's likely that you have extremely strong psychological dispositions that warp your perceptions in predictable ways.
It seems to me that this should inform the way the rest of us respond to claims by reactionaries. If they say, eg, that kids these days don't know how to work hard, absent extremely convincing empirical evidence, that claim should be given roughly zero weight.
If you had told me 30 years ago that there will someday be something called social media, I could have told you, without knowing literally anything about it, that reactionaries will eventually claim to be treated unfairly by it. And so when they inevitably say just that ...
... absent extremely convincing empirical evidence, the claim should be given roughly zero weight.
This just seems like a common sense heuristic to me, and yet it sometimes seems like the bulk of US political journalism is generated by refusing to apply it.
This just seems like a common sense heuristic to me, and yet it sometimes seems like the bulk of US political journalism is generated by refusing to apply it.
Again, to be clear, it's not that if reactionaries claim X -- some X that they have claimed at every time & place throughout history -- it's reason to think that X is *wrong*. It's just absolutely zero reason to think that X is *right*. It's no reason to think anything.
It's like my boy Lionel Trilling said in 1950: "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
Just to add one example. In the 80s & 90s, reactionaries looked at US social policy & cried "lazy shiftless welfare queens & inefficient big-government bureaucracy!" So Dems took a multi-decade neoliberal turn in which they "reformed" welfare to means test it & make it stingier.
At the end of all that, reactionaries looked at US social policy & cried "lazy shiftless welfare queens & inefficient big-government bureaucracy!" The entire neoliberal "maybe they have a point" era did not change the critiques At. All. Not one whit. Zero.
The kinds of things reactionaries say about social policy, about universities, about the administrative state, about cities, about artists & entertainers, about immigrants, etc. etc. *never changes*. Seems like that should tell us something!
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