Worth pointing out that from the perspective of the slave South, the issue with abolitionists wasn’t merely (merely!) that they were a political movement seeking to tear down the foundation on which Dixie society was built and legitimated, it was that in engaging in “underground railroad” direct action, in refusing to return escaped slaves or even resisting federal agents returning them under the Fugitive Slave Act, this faction indulged by northern Yankees were understood as fancy-talking cattle thieves

At some level the American Revolution was about the gentry displacing the aristocracy

As someone who was actually around for the introduction of “light beers” in the ‘80s (the Ad Wars era when the product ecosystem had consolidated from regional champions to a few national combines that took direct shots at each other as the only angle to expand market share, until product manufacturers focused on the balance with themselves-consolidated retailers in the 1990s) it’s actually funny how Coors Light/Miller Lite/Bud Light is the 'Merican real-man norm now and it’s the effete urban hipsters that wallow in heavy-ass IPAs

collapsedsquid:

Reagan’s victory was supposed to mark a turning point for Republicans, toward a conservatism that was “optimistic and popular,” Hemmer writes. Sure enough, Republicans still like to invoke Reagan’s name. But Hemmer shows that Reaganism as an ideology and an attitude collapsed almost as soon as he left office; his name became a mantra without actual meaning. What happened, and why did it happen so quickly?

When Reagan first ascended to the White House in 1981, what made his approach distinct wasn’t his conservatism, with its hodgepodge of small-government libertarianism (less money for education) and big-government anti-communism (more money for the military). Hemmer locates Reaganism’s core in his particular style: flexible, pragmatic, relentlessly cheerful.

Reagan hated to be associated with any policy that was unpopular, retroactively trying to pin the blame for slashing the funding for school lunches on a bureaucracy that was out to get him (“none of this was true,” Hemmer writes). He was open to immigration reforms and liked free trade. His faith in the revenue-generating magic of tax cuts was a reflection of his sunny outlook — tides would rise, boats would lift (only they didn’t, and after cutting taxes inflated a ballooning deficit, he raised them again).

While some Republicans found the Reagan presidency winning, others found it infuriating. Hemmer reminds us that despite the mythology that has flourished since, Reagan got castigated by plenty of conservatives. In 1984, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia railed against the president for being too focused on “governing” and too enamored of unity, when he should have been “forcing a polarization of the country.” A decade later, as the House minority whip, Gingrich would engineer a landslide victory for Republicans that would elevate him to speaker of the House.

Morning in America to Kill America to save it

theresponseblog:

kontextmaschine:

Still working on grokking how into the “80s, the typical handgun was "6 shots, all of which are pretty loose by design”

Until the post-Vietnam era, the Army was filled out with draftees, and they all needed guns, so arms manufacturers had a pretty good deal selling automatic pistols to the government. And they charged government-customer prices, which were out of reach of local police forces and private buyers (and the guns being meant for the government made it a lot less common for boxes of them to fall off the back of a shipping truck.) And since the civilian market wasn’t willing or able to pay government prices, they got cheap shit.

The transition to the all-volunteer Germany/Korea/Stateside-RDD paradigm and the subsequent draw-down meant that those manufacturers had to find new markets, and to figure out how to make money selling to those markets. Some genuinely went downscale, others just chopped back profit margins. Either way it started to be more common for a low-budget buyer to have a more sophisticated firearm.

Reading a 1946 Rosicrucian Order monograph someone passed to me, which low-quality paper is fragmenting such that I won’t be passing it on, so may as well record the take-always here

• Secret knowledge passed on that is basically an esoteric way of saying “the kidneys filter the blood, and staying well-hydrated helps”
• A bit that starts similarly about the solar plexus – it’s involved with the sympathetic nervous system! – and then goes on to frame it as something like a chakra where aura light gathers and can be used for magnetic powers
• An “experiment” to prove this with oil and a toothpick I’m not particularly sure proves anything
• The postwar housing crisis! A convention in San Jose was canceled because the hotels were full of returned veterans without homes.
• An appeal for Rose-Croix University (Fine and Mystic Arts! Physical Sciences! Rosicrucian Healing! Alchemy! Previous College Education NOT Neccesary!)

I mean, it’s clear what’s going on here – in an America where most people didn’t graduate high school, the Rosicrucian Order is posing as a venue for self-improvement and education to make you an elite, using a combination of woo and enthusiasm with just enough actual grounding that an internet modern can tell is patchy but might be indistinguishable from real learning to its contemporary audience

vriskakinnieaynrand:

kontextmaschine:

The world’s not perfect yet, but to the extent I see dumb stuff go by I’m usually like “well, headed for a fall that way” or even “hey, you know you could play a good game of ‘let’s you and he fight’ with this” these days

what of the vernon dursleyization of the millennials and the tiktokstagram boomerization of the internet (esp zoomers), those seem bad

the '90s were also the jack thompson decade! and this time all right-thinking people don’t have the immunity to it that came from, in retrospect, its opposition not having just spent a decade eating shit.

it’s already scored bigger legislative and cultural wins than, like, the PMRC

As I’ve said before, I think the precedent is how the Silent Generation kinda sucked, so we just had to grind through the '50s and the early '60s until pre-Silent types mentored the Boomers to kicking it off, and then the Silents never really mattered again

Yeah honestly that’s kind of where colleges in general were at at midcentury. There was also widespread but now largely forgotten uprising and rioting in the ‘50s against “in loco parentis” practices of colleges trying to act as agents of Parents in keeping the boys from fucking the (then relatively new!) girls

kontextmaschine:

All those fancy-themselves-saucy young leftists on Twitter like “OMG who cares about inflation, I can think of buying a house now!” gonna be surprised when they find out how increased interest rates and a few million people having the same thought to put their tens of thousands in new wealth towards buying a house do to the mechanics of inflation a/o buying a house

Do wonder how the YIMBYs whose angle is largely “make housing affordable for 30somethings with even well-paying UMC-track urban jobs!” feel.

Or the economists (they hate it). Or even the selective-college graduates who already repaid any loans (that weren’t from their parents), whose concern about its effect on their relative standing probably isn’t alleviated by all the beneficiaries grave-dancing about how they’re more thrilled if their gain comes at these copartisans’ expense.

After all that’s probably the demographic that probably corresponds best to college graduates in, say, 1974, when Michael Dukakis was elected Governor of best-educated Massachusetts and started in on winning that traditionally Republican demographic to the Republicans.

Shifting industrial development from smokestacks to the State Route 128 “Silicon Highway”, proving Democrats could work with, not against, the market, fitting in with the way hippie-back-to-the-land sensibility had evolved to yuppie rurality (John Denver, Colorado, I guess around there Vermont and Maine).

But part of that wasn’t just offering goodies, it was giving assurance that the Democrats weren’t a threat to the middle class. That’s what Willie Horton was – the Republicans saying that however appealing the Democrat economy is, electing Dukakis carried the unacceptable threat that he’d be soft on crime.

(The New Deal coalition’s memory of the Democratic Party was that they ended the Depression and gave us the Golden Age of labor aristocracy, and then by the 50s they were like “let’s break up the almost nation-within-a-nation Dixie South’s formal structures of racialized government, not go McCarthyist wild, and culturally loosen up a bit!” and they were like “yeah fair”

Then that in by the early ‘60s the Dems were like “let’s smile on this northern Negro agitation, leftist and pleasure-seeking youth upsurge!” and the traditional base was like “I dunno, could see this going wrong.” Then by the late '60s “it’s gone wrong! UNDO it!” but into the 70s the Dems just did it more.

That’s the threat.)

Meanwhile, after the '70s, stagflation, the collapse of NYC finances, bringing the money guys on board (and without industrial unions to donate out of dues, the Democratic Party qua party needed money guys to fund it) requires their sense of threat to be assuaged.

After defusing black-crime threat – not sparing the bleeding-heart-sympathetic Ricky Ray Rector from execution! – and succeeding where Dukakis failed at beating George H.W. Bush on an “it’s the economy, stupid” basis, this is why Bill Clinton was so sensitive to the bond market, why he passed a balanced budget. He was assuring them! And since, money guys and business guys are increasingly part of the Democratic coalition.

Which is to say they were realigned in. And they can be realigned right back again.

Abortion’s a cleavage Dems can probably make something of (and if that makes for a back-to-90s-coalitions-cause-breeding-kink-is-hotter-without-breeding reaction, all to the good).

I’ve mentioned that this Oregon gubernatorial election has a centrist Democrat running third-party, basically as “the good 'ol” Democrats you remember before the 2010s, attentive to the nonurban economy and regional industries" against an over-nationalized Portland party (where it’s filling with not-even-Cascadian newcomers!)“

And they’re trying to use this against her but given her tag is "Pro Choice and Pro Jobs” it’s iffy – “She might preserve our access but she won’t join with Democratic governments in Washington and California to use the west coast to save the worrrrrld!” does not feel like it’ll be that compelling if you’re not already the type to be tied into party establishments that give you Twitter talking points

apas-95:

ALT

micro-usb-deactivated20230625:

micro-usb-deactivated20230625:

On what other website would you ever get an interaction like this?

100% real btw

Like you realize “libertarians care about age of consent laws” is the exact same thing as “libertarians care about drug criminalization”, which is really “folk libertarianism congealed in the 1980s resentful of attempts to roll back post-60s freedoms through criminal law”

kontextmaschine:

Thinking through the implication that when crime ticked up in the 60s-70s the 20s-30s crime wave was still in living memory

I kinda rolled my eyes at fogeys linking it to the romanticization of crime in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) but I’m maybe underappreciating that Bonnie and Clyde were real people, part of a real wave of armed banditry that people really lived through.

And it kind of seemed to be coming back. Patty Hearst – I can think of at least 4 Dashiell Hammett stories on the premise “San Francisco society heiress kidnapped”.

Bikers descending on rural towns like vikings mirrored the way new automobility enabled that crime wave, as does the iconic candy van or even stranger talking to girls walking home from school – rural crime-solving relied on the way the pool of potential perpetrators was finite, known, and recognizable, “the usual suspects” – someone arriving, enclosed behind a windshield, from merely the next county over, criming, and leaving was an untouchable phantom.

Like an important part of this was that in the period when cars were first introduced they were something only owned by either rich people or greaser hobbyist mechanics

kontextmaschine:

America would’ve won a total nuclear war in 1951 and MacArthur shoulda forced *Truman* to resign

Interestingly I’m not sure this would have left America in a stronger position going forward – the old European empires hadn’t fully collapsed yet and in the absence of Soviet counterweight could plausibly regroup, and other Cold War positions hadn’t been consolidated yet – Indonesia didn’t purge its communists until 1965.

Thinking through the implication that when crime ticked up in the 60s-70s the 20s-30s crime wave was still in living memory

I kinda rolled my eyes at fogeys linking it to the romanticization of crime in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) but I’m maybe underappreciating that Bonnie and Clyde were real people, part of a real wave of armed banditry that people really lived through.

And it kind of seemed to be coming back. Patty Hearst – I can think of at least 4 Dashiell Hammett stories on the premise “San Francisco society heiress kidnapped”.

Bikers descending on rural towns like vikings mirrored the way new automobility enabled that crime wave, as does the iconic candy van or even stranger talking to girls walking home from school – rural crime-solving relied on the way the pool of potential perpetrators was finite, known, and recognizable, “the usual suspects” – someone arriving, enclosed behind a windshield, from merely the next county over, criming, and leaving was an untouchable phantom.

You know if there was a national protection for abortion in cases of rape that would probably lead to red states shredding their statutory rape laws.

I don’t think I appreciated that all the ‘90s worry about teen pregnancy, daytime talk shows, “kids having kids” and all was–

Well, for one it was about welfare, that with the collapse of midcentury industry Black America was just being maintained as a purposeless urban mass with no legal way to obtain more resources but by breeding more purposeless urban masses.

But that to the extent it was a white thing it was about how the 70s way of life had spread out into the rural country and was, fundamentally, 20somethings and older knocking up high schoolers.

Which was maybe the next step after rural America spent the '80s parsing that it was an issue that girls’ dads, or stepdads, or mom’s boyfriends could be knocking them up.

The imagined audience I’m mostly writing for is “grey tribe”, who found the advance of left-“SJW” culture in the 2010s as significant threat; while I probably had equivalent distaste for it, American cultural history is in fact my special interest and I was confident this was not a permanent secular (as opposed to “cyclical” not “religious”, but still meaning “of the earthly world”) change but rather a phase of cyclical progression.

I assured them to that end; that they should not abandon their foundational commitments in pursuit of the cycle, but rather to hold to them in preparation for the cycle coming back around to a refoundational period like the one that first valorized such values.

Like, I think we are right now lining up for a refoundational period the immediate American precedents for are the 1980s, the 1950s, and the later 1910s-early 1920s

It really was something of an American amateur mummery tradition into the 1970s

minigenos:

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official-kircheis:

flakmaniak:

official-kircheis:

the united states declaration of independence is the world’s most famous callout post, change my mind

The 95 theses?

The 95 Theses are not a callout post, just fandom drama. The Decleration of Independence has a literal list of things George III should be cancelled for!

If you were just going off the state’s reputation, you would not guess the two postwar Californian presidents were Nixon and Reagan