Am. History & Culture
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Some Random Thoughts on the American Character
I never quite grasped why Jefferson and Adams were so discouraged by the way the country had democratized by the 1820s. Wasn't that what they, especially Jefferson, had hoped for? I tended to dismiss their concerns as a snooty elitism. But I understand it differently now, especially in light of Trump’s ascendancy. Reading Wood, Howe,
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Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy
I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political
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The Opioid Crisis
From Axios on Saturday: In 2015, white people among the 15 to 64 age group accounted for 80.2% of all opioid-related deaths, higher than their 61.9% share of the population. Native American people were the only other racial group with a higher share of deaths (1.1%) than their share of the population (0.9%). Black people
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Thoughts on Inauguration Day
So it's done. The clown prince sits in his throne and delusion now reigns supreme. But this is not an aberration; it's a dark apotheosis, the culmination of trends in America that go back to WWII and then accelerated after Nixon. It's a culmination in the sense that it brings to its absurd telos the delusional logic of the
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Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers
This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly
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Draining the Swamp
For those who were naive enough to take Trump at his word, this piece by Jane Mayer should disabuse them of their wishful thinking: During the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate
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Why Trump Won
The reasons are complex, and Elizabeth Drew in her NYRB piece about the election covers most of them, but I think it comes down to this part of her article where she quotes J.D. Vance: In an important change from four years ago, only 26 percent of rural voters went for Clinton, in contrast with the
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Understanding Tea Party Anger
From Nathaniel Rich's review of Arlie Hochschild's Inside the Sacrifice Zone in the NYRB Hochschild is also unpersuaded by Colin Woodard’s argument for regionalism as the main factor in shaping political views, and Alec McGillis’s argument that those in red states who most need government services vote at a much lower rate than wealthier conservatives.
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The Storm to Come
We Americans are clearly having a moment. The Trump campaign isn't so much the cause of it, but rather the disclosing of something that has been developing for some time now. If the body politic has ben suffering from a low-grade fever for some time now, the temperature has been climbing steadily since 2008, and the