Am. History & Culture
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Traditional White America
I don't know if the real Bill O'Reilly is more of a sendup on himself than his mocking imitator: The Colbert ReportGet More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
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Michael Lind on Realignment
Michael Lind this afternoon in a post on Salon: When party systems collapse in American history, the new party system tends to emerge from within the dominant party. The defeat of the Confederates meant that the politics of the Gilded Age would be fought between the business and farmer wings of the hegemonic Republican Party.
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Tom Frank on Fizzling Protests
From a Salon Interview: Occupy once looked like it could play that role. Certainly the focus on income inequality and the concept of the 99 percent never would have resonated without their hard work. And it just … It sort of fizzled. That was a real shame. I was real excited about it at first. There was
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Quote of the Day: Christopher Lasch
A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism–which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one's own fears and desires–not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in
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Drove My Chevy to the Levy
Earlier this month in a post entitled Bye Bye Miss American Pie I wrote that traditional America contracted a terminal disease in the twenties and died in the sixties. Don McLean sang the funeral dirge and Marshall McLuhan wrote the obituary. The terminal disease was liberation fever, and the demon spirit that took possession of the corpse
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There Is No Normal Anymore.
One of the peculiar characteristics of the time in which we live is that on one level everything seems to be normal. Life goes on pretty much the way it always has for the last fifty years—adults go to work, children go to school, we get around in cars and watch a lot of TV—there
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The Great Technocratic Society
David Brooks's wrote a column several years ago, that I have to say I agree with to a large extent–culture matters. I think that a fundamental mistake of both the left and the right, for different reasons, is to look at the problems surrounding poverty primarily in economic terms. The economic is obviously a factor, but it's