Am. History & Culture
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Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves
I was going to write something about Republicans and their absurd campaign to accuse the Dems of voter fraud and how the fabric of Democracy is in jeopardy, not because of the long list of things that the Bush administration has perpetrated but because of ACORN?! But who cares at this point? I'm just going
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Conservatism’s King Lear Moment (Updated)
There is a rich treasury of conservative thought waiting to be mined, contemplated, reinterpreted and adapted for our particular time and culture. Read Nash, then read further. We need to think hard within our own intellectual tradition. We need to understand why it is that we're losing people, especially the young. To disdain intellection and
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Tories and Whigs
Reader Brian in comments to yesterday's post questions my designation of Larison as a Whig. My response got too long for a comments in my post about Larison yesterday, so I'm posting it here instead: I see Tories as defined by their commitment to the preservation of status quo power and wealth arrangements that benefit
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Quote of the Day: John Steinbeck
From East of Eden: It wasn't very long until all the land in the barren hills near King City and San Ardo was taken up, and ragged families were scattered through the hills, trying their best to scratch a living from the thin flinty soil. They and the coyotes lived clever, despairing, submarginal lives. They
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Weak-Kneed Liberalism
Interesting post here by Sara Robinson in which she uses D.H. Fischer's Albion's Seed as a tool to explain how voting patterns follow cultural patterns that are rooted in the four colonial-era English cultural groups: Puritans, Cavaliers, Scots-Irish, and Quakers. My early 2006 post entitled The Spirit of Whiggery covers much of the same ground.
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Meaning as Connection
The meaning of meaning and all the semiotic theory developed over the last 150 years is more than I feel capable of getting into, so I would like just to work with a simpler more seat of the pants understanding of what makes our experience meaningful. The key word is “connection,” and how things connect
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The Fundamental Task Is Cultural Not Political
The parameters for the possible in politics are determined by the culture’s spiritual infrastructure. Both political liberalism and conservatism offer nothing because they are both products of an obsolete (or decadent) cultural configuration. The forms remain, like cadavers, but spirit and life are long departed from them. Along thesle lines read this very good short
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How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name
I've been reading Rick Perlstein's gripping account of the sixties, Nixonland, and it's a little disconcerting, since I lived through it, how much I need to be reminded about what was going on then, particularly about the controversies surrounding school desegregation and open housing in 1965-66, both years of unprecedentedly violent summer rioting. As I
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George Will’s Conservative Faith
George Will has been and promoting his latest book collection of his columns. I can't say I'm a regular reader of his columns, but I found a couple of things he said on Colbert and Charlie Rose earlier this week interesting as indicative of a kind of conservatism that I find respectable (as opposed to
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Postmodernism’s Bad Name
Just read this comment by Koszmik at TPM Book Club: Postmodernism, the serious intellectual movement, emerged in a post WWII Europe fatigued by war, having gladly moved beyond feudal and imperial classicisim, but was still struggling with modern ideologies most personified by Cold War propaganda promising two mutually exclusive modern utopias. Postmodernism is essentially an