American Whigs
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More on Jacksonians and Whigs
If Jefferson and Jackson saw political life as a dark struggle of "haves" and "have-nots", Lincoln and the Whigs saw the Democrats–Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Douglasite alike–as an irrational and power-hungry elite, as the real "haves" trying to play the "have-nots" off against the bourgeois "have-somes" in order to lock American politics into a static system
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The Contemporary Crisis in Whiggery
Let's talk about Whigs. When I use the term, I'm concerned more about a mentality or a kind of values constellation than I am about the specific historical Whig Party in Britain and in America. My goal here is to trace the changing party affiliation of the Whig mentality in America to the present day.
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Mythological Thinking
In a debate for the hearts and minds of the American people, Ron Paul will defeat Peter Orszag every time. Michale Lind Lind has an interesting post today at Salon if you're interested in a very ATF explanation for the mindset of the Teapartyers. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and
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Sustainability: A Dem or GOP Value?
Deneen has put up an interesting post in which he points out that Liberals are more conservative when it comes to the environment than people who call themselves conservatives. He talks, I think, accurately about the fundamental incoherence in both the liberal and conservative positions, and the post is worth reading here. What interested me
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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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Whigs and Tories, Jacobins and Fascists
Our political discourse is debauched, and the political terms we use on a daily basis and hear bandied about in the media have become detached from their history and root meanings. In my posts over the years I have tried to be careful about my uses of such terms as liberal, conservative, radical, reactionary, centrist,
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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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Puritans Running Amok
I made a couple of attempts in February here and here to talk about the effect of the Puritan mind on contemporary culture. I was interested in those pieces mainly about the peculiar psychology that is associated with it, and how that psychology shapes our politics. ForestWalker sent me a related article that came out
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The Spirit of Whiggery
One of the things I'm trying to do is to think through for myself a critique of the American political and economic system that isn't dependent on Marxism. The Marxist critique, no matter how trenchant, will always be perceived as un-American. It's always going to be associated with the secular left, which, whether its members