Almost Classical

English: Number of self-identified Democrats vs. self-identified Republicans, per state, according to Gallup, January-June 2010 http://www.gallup.com/poll/141548/States-Competitive-Terms-Party-Identification.aspx. 18 point Democratic advantage 10-17 point Democratic advantage 3-9 point Democratic advantage 2 point Democratic advantage through 2 point Republican advantage 3-9 point Republican advantage 10-17 point Republican advantage 18+ point Republican advantage (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Best interview I've read on the Trump voters. Period. And the Slate reporter? Total jerk. Cannot stand the tone of the questions. I resent the tone. It is precisely why I am not and will never be a Democrat. The insulting, condescending, Thomas Frank "you're all idiots back home" rhetoric pushes me away from the "elites." The reporter? I dislike him more and more as the interview transcript progresses. A self-absorbed, self-righteous intellectual moron. I dislik...

Frederick Winslow Taylor (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) During the Progressive Era from the 1865-1935, the "progressive movement" supported eugenics and other "scientific" methods for improving the societies of humans. The rush to embrace the new and improved — the future — blinded many progressive thinkers from the risks of their ideology. They foresaw a technocratic class in charge of government, rule of the educated class. Like today, they wanted to ban unhealthy activities (Prohibition) and demand people accept the regulatory power of experts. The caricature of the right, that it wished to go backwards, was and is generally inaccurate. Instead, most conservatives simply wanted to move ahead cautiously  and with a conservative skepticism of the experts. Looking back now, the conservatives were right about more than a few things the Progressives promoted. We should realize from experience that there is no one, universal, predictable path forward for any c...

Donald Trump in February 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You vowed to leave if Donald Trump won the White House. Leave. Please. Go. Be gone with you and all of your snobbery, your condescension, your identity politics. The rest of us have work to do! People from marginalized communities cannot pick up and leave the United States. And where would they go? Where would you go? France, where head coverings are banned? Germany, where anti-Semites are out in public again? Where is this mythical better place? A progressive friend posted that people struggling should move from places like Youngstown, Ohio, or rural West Virginia. Let me understand how that works. You have no money. You lost your job, might be on public assistance, have minimal technical skills.... Surely you can move to an expensive city with no problem. No. Most of us have to stick around. We have to gather up our resistance to a Pres. Trump and develop a more coherent strategy to salvange what moderates exist...

When you group people and make everything about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and a checklist of other "differences" you are also creating and reinforcing  the "Working-Class White Male Christian" grouping. That really is not helpful. Even a few of the New York Times ' writers are starting to understand this. Create groups at your own peril, progressives. You might find it doesn't help create a national identity or unity. The End of Identity Liberalism - The New York Times :   By MARK LILLA — NOV. 18, 2016 The whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting ...

A supposed "tolerant progressive" wrote online that Libertarians are "invariably men with immature, selfish attitudes." When asked why she also invoked Ayn Rand on a regular basis when criticizing the "greedy libertarians" she posted that Rand "looked and acted like a man." At least the irony wasn't missed by those posting comments on Facebook. Reading this thread, which started on the site of a major online magazine, the generalities from all sides were disturbing. Can we be any more insulting to people with different views than the approved urban-elitist progressivism? (See, I can generalize, too!) Seriously, my wife is more "Libertarian" than I am, but I consider myself more "libertarian." The range from left-to-right within libertarianism is probably broader than the ranges within either major political party in the United States. What unifies libertarians is a distrust of the majority to protect the rights of the ...

I've long argued that it was not unions or government spending that produced the great post-war boom in the United States and much of the Western World. In December 2014, Tim Worstall published a column on The Register ("El Reg") that agrees with my basic theory: we had to rebuild after the war, and the U.S. was fortunate enough to be the one nation not destroyed during the two World Wars. Bring back big gov, right? If only the economics, STUPID, could tell us more Post-WWII growth rates? Paaah http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/21/bring_back_big_government/ 21 Dec 2014 at 09:00, Tim Worst You don't have to go all that far leftward these days to find someone brandishing economic growth statistics at you. Proving that growth was higher in the 1945-1973 period than it has been in our own more neoliberal age. Thus, of course, we should bring back the signal economic and political policies of those days so that we can speed up growth again. Big Unions, gover...

Jeremy Bentham, by Henry William Pickersgill (died 1875). See source website for additional information. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I disagree with Peter Singer on most ethical measures, and this is no exception… Heartwarming causes are nice, but let’s give to charity with our heads - The Washington Post The notion that we can measure what is "right" using a form of ethical calculus dates back to at least Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and the Principle of Utility. Bentham argued there are seven variables to consider when judging the "best" choice: Intensity of pleasure. Duration of pleasure. Certainty of consequences. Propinquity (proximity, nearness) of pleasure.  Fecundity (abundance) of pleasure. Purity of pleasure. Extent and scope of pleasure for others.  Singer takes things in the direction of Marx, with the needs of the (desirable and productive) many outweighing individual choice of happiness. For Singer, like the Progressives of the Wilson...

The following was posted to the comments section of a very old blog post: The Top Ten Reasons I Hate Capitalism: 10: Kim Kardashian 9: Vast economic inequality destroys democracy 8: Survival of the fittest (I'm definitely not among the fittest) 7: Donald Trump 6: The Attitude of the Fittest toward the Unfit 5: Reality TV 4: Walmart 3: Mark Zuckerberg 2: It appeals to the worst aspects of human nature And the #1 reason I hate capitalism: I am not Bill Gates! Envy! Perhaps that's what it comes down to. That's what the conservatives and defenders of Capitalism would have us believe. Or perhaps there is just something inherently unfair and unjust about it. Yes, it is easy to dislike some of the wealthy in our supposedly capitalist nation. And the easy response is that the United States is not a purely capitalist nation, certainly not as Adam Smith envisioned capitalism and not in the sense that the Austrian economists believed in and promoted either a minima...

Not to belabor the point much more, but I believe there are some basic misconceptions within university humanities departments. I fear theoretical capitalism is being conflated with the modern "conservative" movement and "consumerism" which is, sadly, the dominant perversion of capitalism in practice.   First, our "Culture of Work" was not capitalist in origin so much as it was religious in origin. The notion that "idle hands and minds are the Devil's playthings" emerged long before modern capitalist theory. The religious zealotry of our earliest immigrants gave us that legacy, I would propose. Second, the "job skills" movement in universities is not a capitalist push to alter education. The managerial education can be traced to the early progressive ideals at places like the University of Wisconsin. For example, Woodrow Wilson praised Wisconsin for preparing the next generation of ...

This is an extremely long post — this topic is one I feel almost daily since entering academia. I've heard many colleagues discuss the evils of business and capitalism, and then they ask what I did before joining an English Department faculty. I generally omit most of my experiences and focus on my creative writing. Many of us "capitalists" believe there is a gulf between some academic disciplines and the larger community. Outside business schools and some of the sciences, I know my experiences and beliefs will be insulted or dismissed, usually with "respect" and other polite framing that barely masks derision. People wonder why there is such deep division in our culture? We've become entrenched in dichotomies, when life is not binary (except for the ideological extremists, I suppose). Writing instruction and rhetoric in particular seems entangled in political views. We enter this field with the idea of changing something. You don't teach communica...

One of the arguments I've advanced in various forums, including my classrooms, is that much of the rise America experienced during and after the Second World War was "luck" — we were spared the direct destruction experienced by every other global economic leader. It's hard to lose the war of economic dominance when you're the only player in the game for two to three decades. But what about the "end" of the Great Depression before the War? First, I'm not convinced we were truly out of the Depression; economists and historians debate this. (I've noticed historians are more inclined to embrace the "FDR saved us!" line, while economists are skeptical of simplified credit to a person or political party.) FDR was not a purist; he was a political pragmatist. He spent, or cut, as he saw fit, without any grand plan. I believe it is far too simple to accuse FDR of adhering to Keynes or any other economist's views. FDR bounced from idea to...

The following essay was one I read several times. It is interesting, regardless of one's particular biases because it does offer several important historical references to the nature of "progressive" political views. Obama and the Rhetoric of Progressivism December 10, 2010 By Peter Berkowitz It seems Berkowitz is associated with the Hoover Institute, as a foreign policy expert specializing in the Middle East. He is a political scientist, it appears, with an interest in Western democratic trends and history. His introduction, then, to progressive political rhetoric, correctly begins with an acknowledgment that the movement of the early twentieth century was in many ways a positive force for change. At their best, the original progressives responded to dramatic social and economic upheavals generated by the industrial revolution, opposed real Gilded Age abuses, and promoted salutary social and political reforms. They took the side of the exploited, the weak, and the wr...