framing fail

DeMint is now unable at this point to speak with proper grammar. TNR:

[Y]esterday on ABC 's "This Week," Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, whom Michelle Cottle recently profiled in TNR's pages, took this practice to a comically nonsensical extreme:

DEMINT: We can't promote freedom and democracy by repressing free speech. That's not the way to do it. I think people should be able to come together in associations and organizations and spend money to get their message out. I think that's going to promote the democrat process, instead of really what we've got now, is where you essentially give the labor unions carte blanche over our system, grassroots as well as spending.

The democrat process? DeMint has so thoroughly conditioned himself to avoid the label "Democratic" that he apparently now has trouble uttering the word even when it comes with a small 'd.'

Ugh.

Tea Party's roots

Las Vegas Sun: "The Tea Party's (old) paranoia"

Beck and the Tea Party movement of which he is a central figure are often portrayed as a new and exotic political phenomenon. Pollsters treat the Tea Party movement like a third political party, and indeed, it is especially popular at the moment among unaffiliated voters new to politics.

For voters — most recently in last week’s Massachusetts special election — who believe big government and big business are engaged in a corrupt marriage, the movement feels like a refreshing voice for average people who aren’t in those backrooms and so aren’t getting cut in on the deals, like during health care reform negotiations.

Indeed, Kay Lawrence, a retired art gallery manager who attended a Tea Party event in Las Vegas recently, voices this complaint: “We’re sick of these sweetheart deals.”

For all its apparent freshness, however, the Tea Party movement is neither new nor novel, historians and political scientists say.

It is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and — there’s no polite word for it — its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Connecting them back to the Birchers and others.

US Grant

Better than advertised? Some re-assessments going on. Basically, if we think he was bad it's because of revanchist Lost Cause bullshit dominating the history. So sad.

One random (but good) writer, Nathan Newman:

But with the end of Reconstruction, we have seen history written to bury most memories of the period and assassinate the reputations of those who led it-- including Grant. There were real accusations of corruption among Grant's cabinet, although no one believes Grant himself was corrupt, but those charges of corruption appear relatively minor in light of far worse corruption in many administrations to come. But saying Grant was "corrupt" became an easy offhand way to dismiss his Presidency and Reconstruction at the same time. Even today, there are NO great films honoring reconstruction, just racist anti-Reconstruction films like Gone With the Wind and even modern documentaries like Ken Burns' Civil War only mentions accusations of corruption In Grant's administration -- without a single mention of his vigorous fight against Klan Violence.

TNR: The Return of Ulysses S Grant, a review of a new bio by Joan Waugh. ("Grant’s standing began to erode drastically after 1920 owing to several currents, cultural and intellectual, that emerged from diverse quarters.")



sdf

professor label

NYT: "Professor is a label that leans to the left."

A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.

Gets to Bourdeiu classifications thing, also the efforts to construct political identities over generations. Good assignment for CP.

Prop 8 Trial makes for good history

Observers of the Prop 8 trial are writing some great posts on the history of homosexuality. Given the prominence of historians among the witnesses, this is natural. A great thing. Samples:

Margaret Talbot writes in the New Yorker about George Chauncey ("A Structural Hostility"), who must "focus on the nineteen-thirties through the sixties, the period when, he has argued, gays and lesbians were most sharply stigmatized as deviants and degenerates. But he must also make sure to say, as he did on the stand today, that such attitudes do not belong only to the past."

She links a Rick Perlstein profile of Chauncey from 2004 ("Moment of Decision"), when his scholarship went to the Supreme Court and effectively cut out the argument from tradition:

Sodomy laws, for most of America’s history, were not antihomosexuality laws but bans on all manner of nonprocreative sex. Then came the 1970s. Most states repealed their sodomy statutes as embarrassing anachronisms. But some passed new laws outlawing gay sex exclusively. These laws were as deeply rooted in America’s history and tradition as the lava lamp. At Cobb, Chauncey explained the significance: Bowers did not merely uphold some originary tradition of outlawing sodomy. “It reinterpreted it as if it applied to homosexual couples only. The court said, ‘It’s okay to single out these people.’”

Chauncey and others then worked to overturn this reinterpretation, in Lawrence.

Finally, Independent Gay Forum writes about the trial itself: both Chauncey and Nancy Cott, a marriage historian and expert witness. Interesting passage here about changing language:

When the L.A. historian Stuart Timmons was staying with me researching his book, Gay L.A., he showed me the L.A. Times archives he could access, dating back to the early parts of the 20th Century. But he told me that at first, he wasn’t sure there were many articles about homosexuality; he could not find more than a handful. He knew there were thousands of criminal cases, beatings and deaths from the court documents he had been reading. Did the mainstream press just not cover those stories? Was it a political bias at the historically very conservative L.A. Times?

Then he realized that he was searching for words and phrases he was used to using: “homosexual” and “gay” and “sexual orientation.” But those were not the words journalists would have used prior to our own time.

Try it for yourself. If you have access to any database of news stories up to about the 1960s, see how many articles you can find about homosexuality using the words you know to describe sexual orientation.

Than try using these: “deviant;” “degenerate;” “pervert.”

These will all be useful this semester for various CP weeks.

Don't mess with the devils!!

Pat Robertson, who can always be counted on to blame the victims for the natural disasters that strike them: Haiti made a pact with the Devil to beat the French.

Salon debunks here.

NR shrugs

1956 Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugs from the National Review ("Big Sister is Watching"). Interesting to see how they denigrated it at the time; now it's the Bible. Some good passages show that it will link up well to the course's final week on culture-creating models. Ran wrote fiction because her philosophy was more easily defended in fiction's starker terms:

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

And this:

Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism.

What really amazes me is Chambers' analysis of Rand as simultaneously Marxist and fascist. Her philosophy is materialist, in that it takes economic principles as its motivating force for political philosophy. And her conclusions are fascist, because they place force at the center of all things, they lionize the overclass that delivers violence, and then lauds the overlords as heroes:

So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially — a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

And this then leads us to the problem of how the philosophy applies to the real world. Not well, as we've found out these past 30 years.