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Javier E

Tea Partiers Against College-For Other People's Kids - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ose-elite-tea-party-snobs.html

Republican anxiety education

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 12 - Cached
  • the "snob" remark resonated among the older, strongly conservative voters who identify with the Tea Party. Now comes the odd part: Tea Party activists are 50% more likely than the general population to have a college degree themselves.
  • The older you go in the population distribution, the fewer degrees you find. So a population that is 50% more likely to be over 50 years old—yet also 50% more likely to have a college degree—that's a pretty elite bunch. So why do they hate college so much? 
  • Behind the "snob" remark is a dislike for two different but inter-related groups: the less affluent (who should be working with their hands) and the young (who should be listening to their parents, not some liberal college professor). The remark is powerful because it encapsulates in one word the most fundamental Tea Party emotions: anxiety about those economically beneath them, estrangement from those younger than them.
Javier E

How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...arty-created-donald-trump.html

anti-intellectualism GOP stupid party History culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • It’s hard to know exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the “stupid party.”
  • Stupidity is not an accusation that could be hurled against such prominent early Republicans as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes. But by the 1950s, it had become an established shibboleth that the “eggheads” were for Adlai Stevenson and the “boobs” for Dwight D. Eisenhower — a view endorsed by Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” which contrasted Stevenson, “a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history,” with Eisenhower — “conventional in mind, relatively inarticulate.” The John F. Kennedy presidency, with its glittering court of Camelot, cemented the impression that it was the Democrats who represented the thinking men and women of America.
  • Rather than run away from the anti-intellectual label, Republicans embraced it for their own political purposes. In his “time for choosing” speech, Ronald Reagan said that the issue in the 1964 election was “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant Capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” Richard M. Nixon appealed to the “silent majority” and the “hard hats,” while his vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, issued slashing attacks on an “effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
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  • William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” More recently, George W. Bush joked at a Yale commencement: “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”
  • The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on.
  • Eisenhower may have played the part of an amiable duffer, but he may have been the best prepared president we have ever had — a five-star general with an unparalleled knowledge of national security affairs. When he resorted to gobbledygook in public, it was in order to preserve his political room to maneuver. Reagan may have come across as a dumb thespian, but he spent decades honing his views on public policy and writing his own speeches. Nixon may have burned with resentment of “Harvard men,” but he turned over foreign policy and domestic policy to two Harvard professors, Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while his own knowledge of foreign affairs was second only to Ike’s.
  • There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the “party of ideas,”
  • In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington.
  • the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.
  • It’s one thing to appeal to voters by pretending to be an average guy. It’s another to be an average guy who doesn’t know the first thing about governing or public policy.
  • The Trump acolytes claim it doesn’t matter; he can hire experts to advise him. But experts always disagree with one another and it is the president alone who must make the most difficult decisions in the world. That’s not something he can do since he lacks the most basic grounding in the issues and is prey to fundamental misconceptions.
  • In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become
  • the G.O.P. still has a lot of soul-searching to do. Mr. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the party’s anti-intellectual drift. The party needs to rethink its growing anti-intellectual bias and its reflexive aversion to elites.
Javier E

Defying Trump, Talk Radio Keeps Downplaying COVID-19 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609523

right-wing media expertise reaction science

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • On April 2—four days after Trump changed course and extended social-distancing requirements until the end of April—Limbaugh, citing an article in the British magazine The Spectator, suggested that the “coronavirus is being listed as a cause of death for many people who are not dying because of it.” The next day he alleged that models suggesting hundreds of thousands of Americans could die from the virus are “just as bad and just as unreliable as climate change models.” He went on to accuse the mainstream media of “hyping huge [potential] death tolls” as they had in 1991, when they warned of “all these body bags [the] U.S. military was gonna [need] because the U.S. military had no way to beat Saddam Hussein” in the Gulf War.
  • The government’s social-distancing requirements, these pro-Trump talkers insist, are likely more harmful than the virus itself. “Ten million people have lost their jobs,” Limbaugh announced on April 2. “That’s not enough for people like Bill Gates. That’s not enough for people who want to shoot down the entire country.”
  • Over the weekend, both Ingraham and Levin circulated a Federalist article headlined “Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result In More Coronavirus Deaths.” On April 1, Beck urged policy makers to “start putting hard dates on some of these [social-distancing] measures because we have got to get back to work … A forced economic recession isn’t a gamble that I signed up for.”
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  • they have different incentives than he does. Conservative talkers answer to their conservative audience, which, according to polls, remains more skeptical than Democrats of government restrictions on movement. Trump must worry about public opinion as a whole, which strongly favors government-imposed social distancing
  • Trump must also balance his habitual suspicion of government experts against the fact that Americans trust those experts—in particular, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci—far more than they trust him in the battle against COVID-19.
  • Over the past week, this populist distrust of scientific experts has suffused conservative talk radio’s downplaying of the COVID-19 threat. “The ‘experts’ are routinely wrong on issues big and small—on wearing masks, on reusable grocery bags … virus modeling and treatments,” Ingraham tweeted on April 3. “So when experts issue edicts, remember their often spectacular record of failure.” On April 1, Beck urged politicians “to stop relying on flawed modeling data to make these decisions” and instead “listen to the people in your local communities.
  • Conservative talk radio, by contrast, is built on distrust of experts. Left-wing populists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites
  • In recent years, as progressives have championed the scientific consensus that climate change poses a grave danger, many conservatives have come to see scientists as yet another collection of snobs using the veneer of expertise to impose its liberal ideology on the country.
  • A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that while a large majority of Democrats believed that scientists were better than other people “at making good policy decisions about scientific issues,” a large majority of Republicans disagreed.
  • pulists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites
  • On April 5, Levin warned that “the media, ‘experts,’ and Democrats are trying to make it impossible for the president to even consider rational options for opening parts of the economy.” On April 3, Ingraham declared, “The ‘experts’ aren’t capable of thinking beyond the virus to an even worse death spiral affecting millions of lives here and abroad.”
  • for conservative talkers, the prospect that Americans without elite credentials have discovered a cure that has eluded scientific elites is part of what makes hydroxychloroquine so enticing. “I don’t think you need to have 12 years of residency or whatever,” Limbaugh declared
  • Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck are trying to balance their loyalty to Trump with their distrust of credentialed experts, especially those venerated by the mainstream media. That, so far, they’re largely choosing the latter suggests that liberals may be overestimating Trump’s influence.
Javier E

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ght-trump-proved-me-wrong.html

conservatism right alt-right nativism fascism populism US history

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life
  • In fact, the “far right” was never that far from the American mainstream. The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, writing in the journal Social History, points out that “scholars of American history are by and large in agreement that, in spite of a welter of fringe radical groups on the right in the United States between the wars, fascism never ‘took’ here.”
  • Nevertheless, Steigmann-Gall continues, “fascism had a very real presence in the U.S.A., comparable to that on continental Europe.” He cites no less mainstream an organization than the American Legion, whose “National Commander” Alvin Owsley proclaimed in 1922, “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”
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  • Anti-Semitism in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren
  • When Trump vowed on the campaign trail to Make America Great Again, he was generally unclear about when exactly it stopped being great. The Vanderbilt University historian Jefferson Cowie tells a story that points to a possible answer.
  • In his book “The Great Exception,” he suggests that what historians considered the main event in 20th century American political development — the rise and consolidation of the “New Deal order” — was in fact an anomaly, made politically possible by a convergence of political factors. One of those was immigration. At the beginning of the 20th century, millions of impoverished immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, entered an overwhelmingly Protestant country. It was only when that demographic transformation was suspended by the 1924 Immigration Act that majorities of Americans proved willing to vote for many liberal policies.
  • Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.
  • In their 1987 book, “Right Turn,” the political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson presented public-opinion data demonstrating that Reagan’s crusade against activist government, which was widely understood to be the source of his popularity, was not, in fact, particularly popular. For example, when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit
  • Much excellent scholarship, well worth revisiting in the age of Trump, suggests an explanation for Reagan’s subsequent success at cutting back social programs in the face of hostile public opinion: It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.
  • another answer hides in plain sight. The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right has long been not so much a matter of policy as it has been a matter of show business.
  • It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse.
  • In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.
  • Why Is There So Much Scholarship on ‘Conservatism,’ and Why Has It Left the Historical Profession So Obtuse About Trumpism?” One reason, as Ribuffo argues, is the conceptual error of identifying a discrete “modern conservative movement” in the first place. Another reason, though, is that historians of conservatism, like historians in general, tend to be liberal, and are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse. It’s no surprise that we are attracted to polite subjects like “colorblind conservatism” or William F. Buckley.
  • Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”
  • Until the 1990s, the most influential writer on the subject of the American right was Richard Hofstadter, a colleague of Trilling’s at Columbia University in the postwar years. Hofstadter was the leader of the “consensus” school of historians; the “consensus” being Americans’ supposed agreement upon moderate liberalism as the nation’s natural governing philosophy.
  • He didn’t take the self-identified conservatives of his own time at all seriously. He called them “pseudoconservatives” and described, for instance, followers of the red-baiting Republican senator Joseph McCarthy as cranks who salved their “status anxiety” with conspiracy theories and bizarre panaceas. He named this attitude “the paranoid style in American politics”
  • in 1994, the scholar Alan Brinkley published an essay called “The Problem of American Conservatism” in The American Historical Review. American conservatism, Brinkley argued, “had been something of an orphan in historical scholarship,” and that was “coming to seem an ever-more-curious omission.” The article inaugurated the boom in scholarship that brought us the story, now widely accepted, of conservatism’s triumphant rise
  • American historians’ relationship to conservatism itself has a troubled history. Even after Ronald Reagan’s electoral-college landslide in 1980, we paid little attention to the right: The central narrative of America’s political development was still believed to be the rise of the liberal state.
  • If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?
  • The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump
  • But if Hofstadter was overly dismissive of how conservatives understood themselves, the new breed of historians at times proved too credulous. McGirr diligently played down the sheer bloodcurdling hysteria of conservatives during the period she was studyin
  • Lisa McGirr, now of Harvard University, whose 2001 book, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” became a cornerstone of the new literature. Instead of pronouncing upon conservatism from on high, as Hofstadter had, McGirr, a social historian, studied it from the ground up, attending respectfully to what activists understood themselves to be doing. What she found was “a highly educated and thoroughly modern group of men and women,” normal participants in the “bureaucratized world of post-World War II America.” They built a “vibrant and remarkable political mobilization,
  • I sometimes made the same mistake. Writing about the movement that led to Goldwater’s 1964 Republican nomination, for instance, it never occurred to me to pay much attention to McCarthyism, even though McCarthy helped Goldwater win his Senate seat in 1952, and Goldwater supported McCarthy to the end. (As did William F. Buckley.) I was writing about the modern conservative movement, the one that led to Reagan, not about the brutish relics of a more gothic, ill-formed and supposedly incoherent reactionary era that preceded it.
  • A few historians have provocatively followed a different intellectual path, avoiding both the bloodlessness of the new social historians and the psychologizing condescension of the old Hofstadter school. Foremost among them is Leo Ribuffo, a professor at George Washington University.
Javier E

I'm the food editor - can I really be seduced by Aldi? - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...y-be-seduced-by-aldi-27pb6r76s

food discount grocery stores UK taste

shared by Javier E on 03 May 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve spent the past decade explaining that while I know a lot of people love shopping at Aldi and Lidl, it has never been a place for someone like me — ie middle class, affluent and, as you’re never shy of telling me below the line, a bit of a snob when it comes to food.
  • Yes, there were savings to be made, I argued, but they were not as great as you might think, and they certainly didn’t compensate for the miserable experience of visiting a store, with its lack of choice and long queues.
  • not any more. I take it all back. Aldi and Lidl have got me right where they want me: in their stores with my wallet in hand, most recently picking out a nice wood-fired sourdough pizza and a packet of porcini, chanterelle and truffle-stuffed ravioli. Middle class, moi? I’ve been well and truly snared.
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  • Aldi’s progression highlights the trend. Its first UK store in 1990 was in a working-class area of Birmingham. Now it has identified Oxford, Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells as its next targets, and claims to have attracted an extra 1.3 million shoppers over the past year, two thirds of whom are ABC1
  • my resistance has been twofold. First, I’ve wrongly valued being given a choice. I’ve wanted to choose between five different types of plain yoghurt
  • It’s a fallacy, of course. All that choice really provides is a greater opportunity for the marketeers to manipulate you. The supermarkets have been perfecting the art of upselling you for decades. You don’t stand a chance. The lack of choice on the discounters’ shelves is liberating and means you can get the shop done in a fraction of the time.
  • The other thing that has put me off the discounters is that the stores are a bit crap.
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