arctotherium Profile picture
May 3 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
My view: the Great Awokening is over, but, by default, will be back even worse in 20 years. This cycle has already happened twice, with the 60s/70s New Left and 90s PC. Each time, some of the worst excesses are undone but nowhere near enough to reverse the previous wave.
What I think causes the ~20 year cycle is the education system; the natural result of paying attention in school is to be an insane leftist.
Every major conflict in US history, and most in world history, is taught as left vs right (sometimes "reformers" vs conservatives"), with the left always winning, always being in the right, and always vindicated by history. It's very simple to extrapolate from that!
Each generation tries leftism, sees it fail disastrously (crime, welfare, immigration), and partly backs off, but this experience *isn't* transmitted intergenerationally, and then a new generation whose knowledge of past conflicts comes from school grows up.
(When I was growing up, I never understood why Reagan was so popular; hadn't he been racist and mean to the gays and poors? I had to read right-wing literature from the 60s/70s/80s to understand what he was fighting; my guess is <1% of people do this.)
Then there's a ratchet: every year institutions get browner, more female, less Protestant, and more temporally distant from the world before the 60s revolution; at this point we're several generations in. So the "leftist waterline" keeps rising.
Things that only fringe Communists believed in 1960 are now mainstream beliefs... in the Republican Party, and would be considered incurably reactionary within the Democrats.

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More from @arctotherium42

Jun 25
Employers hiring people and then training them in the specific skills they require has declined as a hiring model for decades, in favor of a hiring market where employers look for people who already have those skills. Image
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In the training/internal labor markets model, a company struggling to find specific skills will train promising entry-level employees. In the hiring market model, they can raise wages or otherwise improve conditions. In both, they can also substitute technology for labor. Image
Neither a hiring market nor training model for matching jobs to seekers is compatible with "skill shortages" as a concept, which implicitly assumes skills are fixed and once people with those skills run out employers can do nothing (except through immigration or schooling). Image
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Jun 24
"Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (TR Fehrenbach, 1973/1995) thread of threads. Mesoamerican civilization was horrifying and very backwards by Old World standards, but unique.
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Jun 24
Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). The PRI had massively expanded higher education. These universities were entirely 'free'/self-governing and became locuses of left-wing organizing. Image
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In 1968, security forces fired upon a massive student demonstration/riot against the Olympic Games. Image
By 1970 Mexico had made enormous progress; the national income increased sixfold while the death rate dropped by half. But Mexico was still struggling with foreign-exchange; the govt pursued import-substitution to improve balance-of-payments. Image
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Jun 24
Thread with excerpts from the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). Calles created the PNR in 1929 to institutionalize the govt and Revolution, creating a Mexican party-state. Image
The Calles/Obregon governments were corrupt, but never succumbed to paranoia; there was no equivalent to the Soviet or Chinese liquidations of class enemies, the press was free, and the average Mexican had nothing to fear from the govt (Red Terror against the Church aside). Image
Roughly 19M acres were redistributed through 1933; most land remained with latifundios. But the new latifundios were not like the old ones, they were commercial enterprises rather than social systems. The clerics, army, and latifundistas were all tamed by Calles/Obregon. Image
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Jun 24
Thread with excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995), on post-Revolutionary Mexico. To justify land reform, the revolutionaries revived the principle that expropriation was justifiable if the national interests demanded it. Image
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The Constitutionalists defeated the Villistas in battle and assassinated the leader of the last revolutionary faction, Zapata, by treachery. Image
Carranza, the erstwhile leader of the victorious Constitutionalists, dug his own grave by trying to promote someone other than Obregon to the presidency after him; he was forced to flee the capital, run down, and murdered. Image
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Jun 22
Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). The Porfiriato gave Mexico a generation of stability and development for the first time since independence. This left Mexico overdue for another civil war: the Mexican Revolution.
One problem was that the Porfirian school system had created a large, literate middle structure (not class). These educated mestizos became dissatisfied due to lack of opportunity; growth was rapid but not rapid enough to absorb them all. Image
The Revolution kicked off in 1910, when Diaz announced he'd won reelection with 99% of the vote. This kicked off an insurgency in Chihuahua, in the mestizo, frontier north. Image
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Read 26 tweets

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