Pulling one piece of that tweet thread:



https://twitter.com/kpanyc/status/882643446934237185

I've seen the evidence of this (nationalism is a new thing) is various histories I've read, it's shocking in context. It's one of many current things we assume have always been, but actually are new inventions.

I actually like Chris Hayes more, as he seems to always be puzzling over wth is going on and he's a sharp guy, maybe moreso than Rachel (who is great but different). Was hooked on Olberman, becase someone needed to get on tv every night and say what a terrible idiot Bush was.

That said, the PBS newshour has always been the standard for information. Maybe my college dorm suitemates thought i was wierd for watching it every night.

It's good stuff, but wtf, why is this on Twitter? Get a blog? The result is stuff is like this:

"19thc=1789-1914=industrialz. & rise of middle class, consolidation of powerful N-S (states def. by nation)...remember Herero genoicde: bitly/10zcEjguV..."

"..a precursor to the Holocaust, talk ab 20thc preview in my interlude on German consolidation."

For ****'s sake, it's a 267 post thread! There are more ways to communicate on the internet than 140 characters at a time.

#OldManYellsAtClouds

I don't watch the call in shows. I watch C-SPAN for speeches and such and avoid the commentary and they have all kinds of talks by experts, university classes and such.

I called into cspan once in 1996 when Andrew Sullivan and Clarence Page were on. I said they were both great writers but they were being overly harsh in their criticism of Hillary Clinton. True story.

well actually



https://twitter.com/brianklaas/statu...15562333351936

Yeah that's true. Would've been much better as a post on medium with paragraphs and everything.

Re: What to read. Lately I've been checking some books out from the local library. I think we need a better understanding of how we got here in order to understand what happens next.

On the whole I think she's obviously correct that the Republican Party and the whole 'right' movement in the US is not conservative.

At the highest level it is and remains deeply wedded to a policy platform that is simply an amoral, almost apolitical vehicle to send more capital upwards to the wealthy. Whatever ideological underpinnings might have existed are stale and they don't even really try hard to maintain a straight face when they recite the old lines. It's an old joke now, but that the President is a billionaire real estate baron with a business empire of global reach who lived in a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan he named after himself whose inner circles probably cavorted with Putin to troll the election -- all of this should demonstrates the party elites aren't actually that nationalist in character, at all. That what really motivates all of them is accumulating wealth and nationalism is just a frame they commandeered to do it.

There is no intellectual wing remaining on the American right, so we can breeze right along there.

And, and the base is highly motivated by white racial and cultural grievances moreso than any great nationalist fervor - as far as I can tell. You can do any number of "is this a racist or nationalist sentiment?" test against the American Right and 9 times out of 10 or more, you're going to get racist back as an answer. In fact I think she even grants this by positing that what we're witnessing is a form of ethnic nationalism, which sure.

But even then, the consistent ethnic nationalist posits that ethnic groups can be identified unambiguously, and that each such group is entitled to self-determination. In Europe, you see this as common-place that the ethno-nationalist group is very, very focus on say what it means to be German and what it means to be Serb or Italian, or whatever, and that immigrants should repatriate back to their homeland to ensure they maintain a level of self-determination. Even a cursory reading of pop history informs us how keen the Nazis were on sorting out what it meant to be Aryan, finding a bunch of mumbo jumbo psuedo scientific rationale for why Aryans deserved their special place, needed more labensraum, how the social order of ethnicity and nationalities existed on a hierarchy.

The modern American right is sort of even more debased and radical than that, not even caring to answer the question. You don't see much effort to really delineate who is white, what's a White American, what should Muslims or people of African descent do? Those are questions deep and central to the ethno-nationalist. The rage filled white American right-winger simply doesn't give a **** and hasn't thought about it. They simply want all those people and their liberal allies brought to heel and humiliated.

That's why they spend so much time fuming about political correctness, and what funny racist jokes they can and can't tell, and demand that TSA and the police profile racial minorities or Muslims, griping about how liberals changed all the rules about Merry Christmas, etc. It's why they love Trump whose principle charm is that he loves these ritual humiliation and domination theatrics. These are the things they care so so deeply about. As we noted, Trump is no nationalist hero; he's nothing of the sort. That's not an ethno-nationalist impulse, they've moved beyond that or side-stepped or more likely never cared. These people are revanchist and filled with rage, equal parts fretting about being dispossessed of their culture and way of life, and they want to humiliate and debase their enemies. Their principle joy in life giggling at racist jokes and seeing someone in a head scarf or a black harassed by police. That more than anything defines the base. Very little properly nationalist about them. The most satisfying definition I've heard of the American right is that they are culturally/socially revanichist and irrendentist. Usually described groups who grasp to regain lost territory, instead the American right is seeking great revenge (hence the huge importance of ritual humiliation of their opponents) against the perceived great loss of economic, cultural and social status. I don't think you can understand the peculiarities of the American right without understanding the feeling of loss, of dispossesion, and the impulse for revenge and humiliation and in their mind, reclamation of their dignity. Subtly but importantly different from a properly ethno nationalist movement.

I think her points are well-taken but subtly wrong in the end.

Speaking of Ethno-Nationalism

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...503-story.html

There is fake news around how jus soli is unique to the USA, and I saw this said in an essay by Christopher Hitchens, but birthright citizenship is nearly standard in The Americas, north and south.

I think I've had this discussion with suzzer but you can sort of tell the American right winger's infatuation with revenge and humiliation and the proper ordering of race and class by precisely where they place themselves in the timeline of American sitcoms, where they want to get to and how they think they get there.

That is, they want to imagine themselves in Mayberry in the the Andy Griffith Show. But they think they get back there via All in the Family.

That is, they think they've been dispossesed of Mayberry, where no one seems to work and white guys hang around chit chatting all day and black people don't show up for 150 episodes over 9 years or whatever. But Andy Griffith was a prissy ***** who used to spend too much time strumming Christian hymns and he didn't pistol whip Otis and Opie gave away too many jackets to poor people.

What they think is that genteel soft authorities like Andy Griffith got us into this mess, and so America needs is lovable aggressive bigot Archie Bunker manning the front lines to restore order, calling liberal losers meatheads and telling the women's libbers whatfor and telling everyone to watch out for the blacks and explaining to the Chinese guy what jobs they're fit for.

In the same way I'd argue you can understand American political zeitgeist by watching the WWE better than by reading academics, similarly, you can understand the sentiments of white America and what fuels their political movements by watching reruns of classic sitcoms.

probably slow pony, but this thread moves crazy fast so it's hard to keep up

http://thehill.com/regulation/other/...e-violated-law

Oops

Meh. Nationalism is just a new manifestation of tribalism, which is as old as humankind. The reason it didn't occur previously was that nation-states were pretty thin on the ground.

"this will be a long thread" + Twitter = somehow, someone has missed the point entirely

And if you want to understand the modern Democratic party?

The Romney wing of the Republican party is Martin Crane. The Trump wing is Bulldog. Everyone else is a Democrat. I can see it

That's a great analysis Dvaut but I think there's more to it as well. The right has always been enamored with the idea that outcomes are 'rational' in a broad sense. Outcomes are 'just' and to the extent they aren't, well God will take care of the exceptions. Blacks are poor, well they're probably just stupid. CEO gets 1000x some workers, well the market has spoken. Market fundamentalism really undergirds a lot of modern 'conservative' thinking, especially among the conservative elite. It's not a coincidence that the view of the conservative donor class are reflected and extended by a smallish class of conservative intellectuals who depends on the elite's largess for their upper middle class lifestyles.

I also take this to be the default/equilibrium view of people like Skalansky and Malmuth and many others. The world and outcomes generally are largely rational, a Ryandian philosophy. Many who voted for Trump no doubt thought: well, Trump must be smart and a great leader because he's rich. I don't think being rich and being smart and possessing other virtues are unrelated, but they are unrelated enough not to be that explanatory.

Point is, there's some core need of conservatism to justify the current order, whatever that may be, whether through 'rational' distribution of resources, or the natural order (aristocracy), or gods plan. To take the leap and assert the current order or distribution is wrong or unjust is to almost adopt a different outlook on the world. It 'creates problems' that need to be solved when many would rather just not be lectured about how the order is bad or wrong and needs to be fixed, particularly when they find themselves in a favorable situation.

Old people don't watch the WWE do they? You might have to get some NASCAR in there or something.

Martin Crane was a cop and a bit of a reactionary. He's definitely going for Trump (and Romney).

How do you know that? That would make us morons. Maybe it's the lack of pathological fear and paranoia that gives you the impression that we're carefree. Pretty sure we have concerns and worries, just not over healthcare, or guns, or brown people, which is a pretty big relief, granted.

Because he's their president and they're unhappy?

Step your reads up.

Worth noting that this is a tremendous engine for very painful cognitive dissonance in certain groups: like, if outcomes are just and your outcome is that you live in a ****hole in decline and all your friends are hooked on Oxy, what is the logical conclusion?

This dissonance leads to either a) inchoate rage, b) the conclusion that the natural order of things is being perverted and a subsequent witch hunt for culprits or c) most commonly, both.

The same phenomenon is at work in some religions (although Christianity neatly dodges the problem by making suffering and defeat in this world basically a sign of victory in the next) and in other political ideologies.

There's also an important caveat i neglected to mention: that society has slipped/fallen from when the just/natural order was fully in effect, and we need to reclaim the past, e.g., Make America Great Again. Conservatives don't as much defend the current order, which is always flawed, so much as an idealized past.

Has a progressive movement ever explicitly called on the past? Nostalgia seems to be a hallmark of conservative movement. It's is a nice anchor, as it doesn't need any specificity or even a particular time frame.

I wouldn't defend all of our wars and am an isolationist militarily at heart. But practically what happens if the US pulls all of its troops form the 150 countries we have them in? Id think world stability could take a hit for a while and there would be less peace in it.

Those things are almost by definition of the words true, along with "reactionary."

It's something to keep in mind. Why is the same person who doesn't want immigrants from Mexico also against renewable energy? Not wanting change is part of both. Along with other things like authoritarianism/law&order and tribalism/racism/xenophobia I think fear of or openness to change is pretty key.

I'm not sure what you do with that info though. Do you cater to that and market based on fear of change - "they're TAKING AWAY your social security" or play to your natural audience and talk about hope and change. I think it's the latter.

I think the left has some of this, exalting the New Deal post-war consensus when trade unions projected power and the middle class was guaranteed some measure of economic security. Say from 1945-1970. Again, this is idealized in that some in the working class may have had it good, but others did not. Certainly not always black labor or immigrant labor, or women. But I think the left does make allusions to that period as a time when things were better, a lost wisdom and proper ordering, something we should return to. How much of this is genuinely ideological (certainly some) versus say reflexively nostalgic -- that is, how much of this is Democratic politicians seizing on nostalgia of a bygone era to simply flatter baby-boomer sensibilities (surely some of that as well) -- hard to say.

A lot of that 150 consists of countries with literally just a handful of people in a radar station or liaison or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ry_deployments

There are 16 countries with 1000+ and like 20 with 100-1000.

Looking at where the most troops are I think the questions are: are they still needed in Western Europe, Japan and S.Korea, can those countries defend themselves, and do we want them to defend themselves as opposed to us doing it?

I know the answer for Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop-Grumman.