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.

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1555985118933688328

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.

"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.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1553401697153601538

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".

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.

https://twitter.com/WHarpine/status/1345446943670087680

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1345149447294992384

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/Ron06212876/status/1345105400786526208

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.

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.

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.