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Javier E

Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ican-julius-evola-fascism.html

white supremacy fascist traditionalist crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.
  • Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.
  • They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.
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  • he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.
  • “It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.
  • A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found.
  • The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses.
  • The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion.”
  • Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.
  • Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.
  • A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.
  • Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”
  • “When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”
  • It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.
  • Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”
  • Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.
  • Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.
  • As Mr. Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, he mentioned “Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian Fascism.”
  • In his Vatican talk, Mr. Bannon suggested that although Mr. Putin represented a “kleptocracy,” the Russian president understood the existential danger posed by “a potential new caliphate” and the importance of using nationalism to stand up for traditional institutions.
  • “We, the Judeo-Christian West,” Mr. Bannon added, “really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”
  • As Mr. Bannon suggested in his speech, Mr. Putin’s most influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian Traditionalist and anti-liberal writer sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin.”
  • An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called for a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism” and advocated a geography-based theory of “Eurasianism” — which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin’s expansionism and meddling in Western European politics.
  • Mr. Dugin sees European Traditionalists as needing Russia, and Mr. Putin, to defend them from the onslaught of Western liberal democracy, individual liberty, and materialism — all Evolian bêtes noires.
  • This appeal of traditional values on populist voters and against out-of-touch elites, the “Pan-European Union” and “centralized government in the United States,” as Mr. Bannon put it, was not lost on Mr. Trump’s ideological guru.“A lot of people that are Traditionalists,” he said in his Vatican remarks, “are attracted to that.”
Javier E

Steve Bannon's Coalition of Christian Traditionalists - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...519900

traditionalist populism christian history politics culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.
  • Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.
  • In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.
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  • upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
  • Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”
  • Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.
  • While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.
  • previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.
  • Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.
  • The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.
  • the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.
  • In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.
Javier E

The Meaning of Milo - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-meaning-of-milo.html

right-wing conservatism provocateur culture politics gop

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • social liberalism’s sweeping victory produced new forms of backlash — less traditionalist and more populist, less religious and more rowdy, not sacred but profane. These forms of resistance take aim at liberalism’s own forms of social-justice sanctimony, which have smothered academic life and permeated notionally apolitical arenas from late-night comedy to sportswriting. The resisters don’t exactly have a program. Instead, they’ve got a posture — a “whaddya got?” rebellion against any rules that the new liberal order sets.
  • rebels do not necessarily have all that much in common with one another, let alone with the remainders of the religious right. The Trump-voting “deplorable” is likely to be a cultural evangelical but not a churchgoer, or a pro-choice lapsed Catholic who never cared for religious moralists. The typical “manosphere” denizen is something else entirely — younger, tech-savvy, impious, impressed with his own unblinking Darwinism. As constituent parts of cultural conservatism, these groups don’t form a particularly coherent whole; what unites them are common fears (feminism, political correctness, sometimes Islam), not a common cause.
  • America is becoming more like Europe, where conservatism has been less than religious for some time, and the cultural right has long had a fractured and incoherent quality. (Consider France’s National Front, which draws support from Catholic traditionalists, ex-Communist workingmen and secular — and gay — voters who fear Islam’s encroachments.)
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  • Milo’s appeal on the right is, one might say, intersectional.
  • Moreover, his provocations tend to actually work, in the sense that they summon up the illiberal, “shut up or we’ll shut you down” side of left-wing politics.
  • for a cultural conservatism united only by a shared outsider sensibility, neither consistency nor propriety are consensus virtues any longer — and indecency in the service of attacking liberalism is no vice.
Javier E

The Great Divorce - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-great-divorce.html

class division polarization inequality social class divergence US culture war

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society.
  • His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big.
  • More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage
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  • Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
  • People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.
  • Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe.
  • In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.
  • there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country).
  • Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.
  • Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties
  • Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.
  • It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.
  • The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.
  • Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.
alexdeltufo

In Search of American Fascism - The New York Times - 0 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-search-of-american-fascism

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • he is more fascistic, at least, than most of the populist candidates (Wallace, Perot, Buchanan) to whom he’s reasonably been compared.
  • genuine-article fascism, it seems worth digging a little bit into the ways in which Trump doesn’t deserve the fascist label,
  • hich riffed on Umberto Eco’s famous essay laying out various hallmarks of the fascist style. As Bouie noted
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  • Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution
  • his revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages
  • Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”;
  • incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically,
  • … If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know
  • However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface
  • In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
  • But that’s a digression: My main purpose in quoting Eco is to point out how poorly these two descriptions fit Trump,
  • But then, of course, these two descriptions make a poor fit for nearly every American political tradition,
  • founding boast that ours is a novus ordo seclorum, and assumes that any pre-18th century wisdom cannot fully match the glories of our brave new republican experiment.
  • Whether or not a conservative tradition is possible in this landscape, a traditionalist tradition does seem well-nigh-impossible.
  • but then the South’s Protestant/agrarian/localist distinctives cut against fascism in all sorts of other ways.)
  • Nor does a mere politics of nostalgia, of the kind that both right and left can manifest, really resemble the kind of traditionalism
  • But what he’s nostalgic for is not some sort of deep, pre-modern antiquity or a pre-1789 ancien regime.
  • co himself might say yes, since his essay suggests that just one hallmark of fascism in a political movement or culture suffices “to allow fascism to coagulate around it,”
  • And if we want to actually place fascism somewhere on the political spectrum,
  • contretemps this was one of the assumptions held by a number of Jonah Goldberg’s critics, and one of the major claims lodged against his thesis
  • This argument wasn’t completely persuasive: As Goldberg countered — and as Eco’s line about Saint Augustine and Stonehenge suggests
  • was a bastion of a certain kind of syncretistic traditionalism.)
  • American conservatism as well. If fascism is ultimately defined by a cult of tradition, t
  • Which means in turn that whether the figure being accused of fascist tendencies is Woodrow Wilson or Donald Trump, t
  • approaching and approaching and approaching, but because of our shared American-ness, never quite getting all the way.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Ross Douthat 
g-dragon

Why Does ISIS Want to Establish a New Caliphate? - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/sis-and-a-new-caliphate-195599

Isis Golden Age Caliph

shared by g-dragon on 02 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The radical Islamist group ISIS, which now calls itself the Islamic State, is intent on establishing a new Sunni Muslim caliphate.
  • To some traditionalist Sunni Arabs, this caliphate was so debased that it is not even legitimate. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and a new secular, modernizing government took power in Turkey. 
  • In 1924, without consulting anyone in the Arab world, Turkey's secularist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the office of the caliph entire
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  • Centuries of humiliation and subjugation, first by the Turks, and then by the European powers that carved up the Middle East into its present configuration after World War I, rankle with traditionalists among the faithful. They look back to the Golden Age of Islam, during the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, when the Muslim world was the cultural and scientific center of the western world, and Europe a barbaric backwater.
  • ISIS, however, finds itself in a different situation than al-Qaeda did and has prioritized the creation of a new caliphate over making direct strikes on the western world. 
  • Conveniently for ISIS, the two modern nations that contain the former capitals of the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates are in chaos. Iraq, once the seat of the Abbassid world, is still reeling from the Iraq War (2002 - 2011), and its Kurdish, Shi'ite, and Sunni populations threaten to splinter the country into separate states. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War rages in neighboring Syria, former home of the Umayyad state.
  • ISIS has succeeded in seizing a fairly large, contiguous area of Syria and Iraq, where it acts as the government. It imposes taxes, imposes rules on the local people according to its fundamentalist version of law, and even sells oil drilled from the land it controls.
  • The self-appointed caliph, formerly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is gathering young militants to his cause with his success in seizing and holding this territory. However, the Islamic State that they are trying to create, with its stonings, beheadings, and public crucifixions of anyone who does not adhere to their exact, radical brand of Islam, does not resemble the enlightened multicultural centers that were the earlier caliphates. If anything, the Islamic State looks more like Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
knudsenlu

A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hovater-white-nationalist.html

america nazi normalization US culture

shared by knudsenlu on 26 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.
  • In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.
  • Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’
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  • “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”
  • He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.
  • what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II
  • knudsenlu on 26 Nov 17
     
    This article has been widely criticized for normalizing nazis.
Javier E

The Conservative Mind - David Brooks-NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oks-the-conservative-mind.html

conservativism Republicans history order tradition capitalism liberty economic

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 12 - Cached
  • the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities.
  • economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.
  • the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.
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  • They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, fi
  • This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously.
  • The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.
  • Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion
  • In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse.
  • It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.
  • Republicans repeat formulas — government support equals dependency — that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms.
  • Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.
James Flanagan

Russia and America: The dread of the other | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...nism-todays-russia-dread-other

shared by James Flanagan on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • No other country looms so large in the Russian psyche. To Kremlin ideologists, the very concept of Russia’s sovereignty depends on being free of America’s influence.
  • Anti-Americanism has long been a staple of Vladimir Putin, but it has undergone an important shift. Gone are the days when the Kremlin craved recognition and lashed out at the West for not recognising Russia as one of its own
  • , it wants to exorcise all traces of American influence.
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  • . The trigger for the new anti-Americanism was the street protests against the Duma election in December 2011, which the Kremlin blamed on America. Falling popular trust in the Kremlin, worries about capital flight and the economy, and an antagonistic urban middle class have led Mr Putin to resort to nationalism, traditionalism and selective repression. Unable to stoke ethnic nationalism for fear of igniting the north Caucasus again, he has instead taken aim at the West and Western values.
  • All this, according to Mr Pushkov, ends an era when Russia looked to the West as a model. Some Russian deputies have even suggested fining cinemas that show too many foreign films, or banning foreign words. A new law makes it treasonable to provide consultancy or “other assistance” to a foreign state directed against Russia’s national security. “The government’s policies are driving Russia into isolation,” says a Western diplomat.
  • For instance, the Kremlin has banned American couples from adopting Russian orphans, depriving many children with severe disabilities of the chance of a decent life.
  • The Russians have shut off all co-operation that uses American money, including on health care, civil society, fighting human trafficking and drugs, and dismantling unconventional weapons.
  • As Mr Pushkov tweeted, “Stalingrad was not only a breaking point in the war, but also in the centuries-long battle between the West and Russia. Hitler was the last conqueror who came from the West.”
  • A few years ago, such comments came only from right-wing nationalists. Now they belong to the mainstream.
  • the Kremlin has imposed its traditionalist agenda on Russian society by prosecuting Pussy Riot, the punk singers who performed obscenely on the altar of Russia’s main cathedral, by banning the promotion of homosexuality and by blocking the American adoptions.
  • Yet it has not boosted Mr Putin’s popularity or restored trust in his presidency. Indeed, the numbers seeing America as a friend, not a foe, have risen in the past year, according to a Levada opinion poll. One explanation for this might be growing mistrust of the Kremlin. That is what made Soviet propaganda ineffective 20 years ago. Russian society also seems to have limited enthusiasm for the growing political role of the church.
  • The irony is that the Kremlin’s anti-Americanism reveals not its independence but its reliance on America as an enemy. The real casualty may be Russia itself.
Javier E

The self-refuting idea that America needs Donald Trump as a savior - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html

crisis political correctness decency conservative despair

shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • There is no question of ethics, political philosophy or theology to which Trump is the answer. It is simply childish to trust this contemptible parody of a father figure.
  • There is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But there is also a great deal to love in our own, if you choose to look for it. There is abuse, addiction, abandonment — and kindness, courtesy and compassion
  • But I am a traditionalist with a healthy respect for the achievements of modernity, because I can imagine myself in the position of a woman, a gay person or a minority 50 years ago. The lives of countless millions have been improved. For them, the nostalgia of conservative white men is not a rallying cry.
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  • As a conservative, I am not one to deny the challenges of modern, liberal societies — the fragility of families, the brittleness of institutions, the economic struggles that result from globalization, the pulverization of community in some sad and dangerous places.
  • I fully expect the next generation to be a source of renewal, because I am confident that certain core ideals and institutions best fit human beings and allow them to flourish. I believe that our children and grandchildren will be brave, free and daring in pursuit of ageless ideals — and that teaching them to despair would be the true source of national ruin.
  • For a certain kind of right-wing nationalist, it always comes down to this. “Our people” must be preserved from invasion, rape and machete attacks by other people whose arrival would cause “a country, a people, a civilization” to die.
  • Trump has achieved one good thing in our politics. He has revealed motives that used to be hidden by “political correctness.” They were also hidden by human decency. In terms Decius would understand: This is playing with fire!
rachelramirez

A-List's Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...b-hits-him-where-it-hurts.html

trump politics US history

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts
  • Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural
  • America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture
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  • Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president. “All in the Family” chronicled the racial and cultural upheavals of the Nixon era. Bill Clinton captured the zeitgeist of young voters in the early 1990s by playing his saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall” show
  • owes his election in large part to the sense of familiarity that being a reality TV star afforded him. That status allowed many of his voters to put aside his misogyny and vulgarity
  • onservatives rail at Hollywood movies that make them feel alienated by presenting capitalists, corporations and moral traditionalists as the villains, and sexual libertines, iconoclasts and the godless (or godlike, in the form of superheroes, witches and warlocks) as the heroes.
  • the 80 percent of white self-professed evangelicals who voted for Trump purportedly did so to lay claim to the courts, where they believe they can yet win out on banning abortion and birth control, forcing women back into traditional roles, and undoing gay marriage
  • Obama, though, has taken celebrity association to another level. He has been a darling of Hollywood, the music industry and popular culture from the time he declared for president in 2007
  • which dined out on vows to discriminate against Mexicans and Muslims while unleashing a resurgence of racist hate groups and just plain haters is reaping the cultural opprobrium it sowed. And it’s making The Donald miserable.
Javier E

The left won the culture war. Will they be merciful? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html

culture war conservatism politics

shared by Javier E on 28 May 16 - No Cached
  • Ideological lines in U.S. politics are shifting and blurring rapidly: The rise of Donald Trump, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the resurgence of libertarianism prove at least that much. It’s reasonable to assume that religious conservatives, too, are rethinking their role in American society and politics.
  • That rethinking probably began in earnest with Richard John Neuhaus’s book “The Naked Public Square” in 1984. Neuhaus, acknowledging pluralism as a hard reality rather than condemning it as a temporary deviation, nonetheless sharply criticized the idea that the public sphere can have nothing to do with religiously informed principles and arguments. In 1990, he founded the influential magazine First Things, in which Catholic, Protestant and Jewish intellectuals reflect on the role of religion in America’s rapidly fragmenting society.
  • Notre Dame historian George Marsden — a self-described “Augustinian Christian” and so something close to an evangelical, whatever that still means — has argued in his book “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment” that religious traditionalists and secularist liberals can avoid a great deal of acrimony by defenestrating the midcentury idea of a “neutral” public sphere and instead adopting what he and others have termed “principled pluralism.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • in his new book “The Fractured Republic,” the scholar and journalist Yuval Levin, a Jewish social conservative, has counseled both religious conservatives and secularist liberals that they can repair our dysfunctional politics by comprehending the implications of this one essential truth: that American society is no longer the consolidated unit it once was but a diffuse assortment of subcultures.
  • Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.
Javier E

The Coming Gendered Armageddon - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...the-coming-gendered-armageddon

white supremacy mysoginism demagogue 2016

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • looking just at Trump's case, it is not hatred of women per se but hatred of powerful women or female power itself that is the defining trait. In a society where women have become more powerful in all aspects of life for decades and where gender equality is a defining political issue, the distinction may be rather semantic. But this is about power and being out of place in the proper hierarchy of power which has Trump at the top at all times.
  • t the intensity of 'racism' has always been precisely related to the degree to which white supremacy was contested. Trump's misogyny is of a piece with this.
  • Trump's personality and political traction is one rooted in dominance - indeed, assertions and demonstrations of dominance.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • how this relates to the on-going issue of violence at Trump rallies. These aren't just stern reactions to hippie-loser protesters. These have evolved into campaign rituals where Trump and his followers play out the centerpieces of his campaign: authority, domination and violence - and Trump's ability to reassert the proper hierarchies his followers crave.
  • , this tells us why many evangelicals and other traditionalist, right-wing Christians are so supportive of Trump, notwithstanding his fairly open life as a sexual braggart and libertine: because he stands - quite convincingly - for authority, hierarchy and patriarchy.
  • For many of his supporters, whether they use the phrase or not, he stands for white supremacy.
Javier E

The Great Divorce - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-great-divorce.html

class US upper class lower-class trends cultural conservative

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 12 - Cached
  • His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big.
  • Since then,
  • America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad. People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 12
     
    "The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive" (Haner). A gripping fresh look on the classes of today. I enjoyed reading about this spin on the topic of cultural corruption on behalf of the socially elite. I also liked how Haner brought up the time-old conflicting views of Democrats and Republicans. Haner is able to easily criticize both sides- unlike most of us, as we tend to automatically focus our energy on the recycled ideas of past party members.
Javier E

Why Did We Care About John McCain? - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-did-we-care-about-john-mccain

myth mccain hero

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • I should note here that when I use the word “myth” I do not mean it as a fairy tale or cover story. To say something is a myth is not to say it is either true or false. Myths are stories we tell to make sense of and give meaning to the unorganized facts of existence, which themselves are mute and have nothing to tell us. As humans, we can only really understand things through stories.
  • Looking back on McCain’s political life it is hard not to conclude that the public fascination with him was essentially a matter of this conversation baby-boom men have been having for decades about their youth, the Vietnam War and the meaning of their lives. The other is essentially one for Democrats and the reporters whose main political identity is hostility to ideology who were beguiled by his supposed “maverick” status and political heterodoxy — either praising him for it or chiding him for not living up to it.
  • These folks loved the idea of McCain’s heroism, his sacrifice (all real) and his charm but just wished he wouldn’t support policies they hated. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that so many Republicans hated McCain. He was a Democrat’s idea of what a Republican should be. For Democrats, being a Republican who consistently voted as Republicans do amounted to a betrayal of who they thought he was supposed to be. But that’s who he was, a fairly conservative Republican
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  • The through-line, as best as I can divine it, through the last two decades was a deep, traditionalist devotion to country, a deep patriotism which for all of McCain’s faults never seemed to be a vehicle for demonizing domestic enemies, something that sets him apart from most of today’s Republican party and certainly from the President who now embodies it.
Javier E

Why Trump Supporters Don't Care About Cohen's Admission - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568147

trump corruption traditionalist identity culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Trump’s supporters say they care about corruption. During the campaign, they cheered his vow to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. When Morning Consult asked Americans in May 2016 to explain why they disliked Hillary Clinton, the second-most-common answer was that she was “corrupt.”
  • Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes
  • In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruptio
  • In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences
  • The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.
  • Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense
  • Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.
  • Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity.
  • And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.
Javier E

Opinion | How Climate Became Germany's New Culture War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-climate-cars.html

germany culture war climate change environment

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • populist parties in Germany and Europe are increasingly campaigning against environmental rules. Such opposition perfectly fits into populist narratives and patterns: skepticism about science, anger over “political correctness” and a libertarian reflex against government regulations in general
  • The mainstream right is following suit, claiming to try to cut off the far right but in reality taking advantage of a suddenly attractive political target.
  • Environmental issues produce the same fundamental cleavages as migration. Both migration and environmental policies are aiming at global and moral goals that citizens profit from only in the abstract, while the costs are immediate.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Whether you drive a car or ride a bike has become a symbol for embracing or rejecting a whole set of values connected to the notion of global responsibility.
  • onservatives and traditionalists feel they are being pressured by the cultural imperialism of urban liberal elites who can afford not to have a car.
  • It’s 2015 all over again: Back then, it was the naïve open-border idealists against the xenophobes. This time it’s the sentimental urban tree-hugger ideologues against ignorant Joe Diesel.
  • the stakes this time — namely, the future of the planet — are higher. How do we avoid making the same mistakes?
  • The obvious first step is to lower the temperature, and for each side to concede a few painful truths
  • environmental policies do come with costs, and that they need to find ways to ameliorate their immediate pain for everyday Germans
  • conservatives must resist the lure of securing votes by exploiting resentment against the boogeyman of cultural imperialism
manhefnawi

Madrid: City of The Enlightenment | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...madrid-city-enlightenment

Enlightenment Spain Architecture Culture

shared by manhefnawi on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • In 1785 Tomas Lopez, Royal Geographer to King Charles III and Spain's foremost cartographer, published his Piano Geometrico de Madrid
  • That Lopez should include on his map uncompleted structures is not surprising. Since the accession of Charles III (1759-88) to the throne of Spain and its extensive and increasingly prosperous overseas empire, much of Madrid had been turned into a dusty construction site.
  • Madrid had only been Spain's capital since 1561, when Philip II made what had been a town of purely secondary importance the political centre of his empire
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Despite its demographic growth, it remained throughout the old regime period a court city, dominated by the king's household and government and their interests, as well as by the courtiers and other nobles and commoners attracted by the prospect of jobs, pensions, good marriages and high status
  • The threat this implied to order inspired some of the most significant of the reforms undertaken under Charles III
  • Not surprisingly, when Charles III -who had lived in Italy since 1731 as Duke of Parma and, from 1734 to 1759, as the first Bourbon king of Naples - arrived in his capital for the first time since he left it as a young boy, he was depressed by almost all that he saw. His determination to impose change provided a major impetus for the coming reforms
  • To Charles III and his ministers they seemed unworthy of the greatness of the Spanish imperial monarchy. Equally significant, they seemed to reinforce too strongly the presence of the church in an era in which enlightened thought set out to undermine baroque religiosity and clerical influence in secular life
  • The Enlightenment was as varied and multifaceted in Spain as in most other European societies, the ideas and programmes of enlightened reformers moulded by differing social and cultural conditions
  • But the characteristics which most typified Enlightenment reform in Spain were - apart from the heavy the arts as means of improvement -the impetus it received from Charles III and most of his ministers and the significant role played by some noblemen
  • Only during the reaction of the 1790s against the excesses of the French Revolution did most progressive thinkers find themselves effectively hedged in by the ministers and inquisitors of the new king, Charles IV (1788-1808). Under Charles HI, however, the king and his family, his ministers, sundry aristocrats in Madrid and elsewhere, many clerics and royal officials and some men and women of the professional and commercial middle classes harboured reformist ideas and patronised broadly enlightened artists and writers
  • This culture of the wealthy, enlightened elite, so heavily gallicised and secular-minded, was increasingly alienated from the ordinary people of Madrid, as well as the more traditionalist middle and upper ranks who chose to play no role in enlightened society
  • High food prices and the shortage of necessities could easily spark riots, as they did in the spring of 1766. The so-called Esquilache uprising, named after the Sicilian-born minister who was a principal target of the crowd's anger, spread from Madrid to many cities across Spain
  • The Manzanares was canalised and the Municipal Charity Committee, devised by Armona, was so successful that Charles III ordered similar bodies to be set up elsewhere. Free primary schools, essentially vocational, were established in each neighbourhood
  • Charles III, who had added numerous important buildings to Naples and nearby towns during his years as king there, sought from his first months in Spain to enhance his new capital
  • Travellers describing the capital in the 1770s and 1780s were impressed by its well lit, clean and impeccably paved streets; by the Paseo del Prado, which became one of Europe's finest thoroughfares; and by most of the structures Charles III had had built
manhefnawi

Spain - The reign of Charles III, 1759-88 | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...e-reign-of-Charles-III-1759-88

Charles III IV Bourbon Reforms French Revolution Napoleonic Wars

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Two features distinguished the reforms of Charles III (the “Caroline” reforms) from those of the early Bourbons. First, Charles was a “reformer’s king” in that he consistently supported reforming ministers.
  • After 1714 Spain experienced a gradual economic recovery, which became quite marked in the second half of the 18th century.
  • Charles III maintained that the key to Spain’s prosperity lay in the development of an American market in the Indies. He saw clearly that Spain alone could not preserve an overseas market closed to the outside world against Britain.
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  • Once it was clear to Charles that British terms were nonnegotiable, then the Bourbon Family Compact of 1761, a mutual-defense treaty with France, was a piece of realpolitik, signed by the “Anglophile” Ricardo Wall.
  • The consequence of such an alliance was involvement in the Seven Years’ War—too late to save France.
  • The Treaty of Paris (1763) concluded the Seven Years’ War and destroyed France as an American power.
  • The Family Compact was therefore an immediate military failure, and it was only the revolt of the North American colonies against Britain that enabled Spain to recover the ground it had lost; the successful alliance with France to aid the colonists resulted in the Treaty of Versailles (1783), which gave back Sacramento, the two Floridas, and Minorca.
  • In 1788 Charles III, who had been the “nerve” of reform in the sense that he loyally supported able ministers, was succeeded by his son, Charles IV, a weak, amiable man dominated by a lascivious wife, María Luisa.
  • The volume of Spanish goods in the American trade increased 10-fold in 10 years, prompting British concern at the Spanish revival.
  • The purpose of reform was to remove what seemed to civil servants to be “traditional” constrictions on economic growth and administrative anachronisms that prevented the efficient exercise of royal power.
  • The main attack of the regalists fell on the Jesuit order.
  • The question arises of the extent to which the policies of Charles III resulted from the acceptance by his servants of the precepts of the Enlightenment.
  • When the French Revolution exposed the dangers of progressive thought, the traditionalist cause was immensely strengthened, and the Inquisition appeared to the crown itself to be a useful instrument to control the spread of dangerous ideas
  • The problems of imperial defense were thus temporarily solved by British weakness after 1765. The positive side of Charles III’s imperial policy was an attempt to create an efficiently administered colonial empire that would provide the crown with increased revenues and with a closed market for the exports of an expanding Spanish economy, a program known as the “Bourbon Reforms.”
  • the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars put unbearable pressures on a weak power. Reform was now dangerous. Neutrality was impossible; alliance with either France or the anti-revolutionary coalitions engineered by Britain proved equally disastrous
  • Spain had no alternative but to declare war on France after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. The war was popular but disastrous; in 1794 the French armies invaded Spain, taking Bilbao, San Sebastián (Donostia–San Sebastián), and Figueres (Figueras).
  • Napoleon had lost all faith in Godoy and Spain as an ally; the “dirty intrigues” of Ferdinand, prince of Asturias and heir to the throne, against his father and Godoy led Napoleon to consider drastic intervention in Spanish affairs
  • compelled the abdication of Charles IV and the dismissal of Godoy. Napoleon summoned both the old king and Ferdinand VII to Bayonne, where both were compelled to abdicate. The Spanish throne was then offered to Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother.
Javier E

Norman Podhoretz Still Picks Fights and Drops Names - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ks-fights-and-drops-names.html

intellectual NY history politics culture community jewish

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • As for the intellectual world that had nourished him, he said, it was a product of another time. “Nobody cares that much anymore. We really cared. Art had become a kind of religion, I mean a substitute for religion.
  • Four decades after the Family faded, what is most striking about them may not be their brilliance, but that they aired their ideas in the presence of equal resistance: liberals in the presence of conservatives, modernists in the presence of traditionalists. Fragmented media have made such airings unnecessary.
  • “My view of life is, most people mind their own business,” he said. “They go to make a living, they got marriages, they got kids. And only a small minority of people venture forth into things that don’t have a direct bearing on their lives.” After the battles of the 1960s and ’70s, he said, the air has gone out of such disputation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “All Americans really care about is sports,” he said. “They pretend to care about other things, but what they care about is sports.”
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