Modernity and its Discontents

As a factor of political and social instability, to lose a war is perhaps the most obvious form of humiliation, but the United States has never really lost a war, at least not in the classical sense where the national sovereignty is impugned and one nation finds itself subject to another.   In each of our three major wars, our own Civil War, the first World War, and the second World War, there was a clear victor in the classical sense.   The North prevailed over the South, and thenceforth the South became something a subject people, politically reintegrated into the union, while remaining culturally distinct.   There is much that can be said about our Civil War, and much has been said.   Suffice it to say that the painful lessons learned during our own period of reconstruction have not been fully overcome, now almost two centuries later, as exemplified by the contentious battle over the heritage represented by confederate statues in confederate states.   The ...

The Politics of Grievance David Roth, “Making Sense of Donald Trump’s Petulant Reign,” New Republic , June 12, 2019. There seem to be two aspects to Donald Trump’s personality.   The first, and the one that connects him to the Evangelical communities, is the messianic.   He believes himself to be, in effect, the chosen one sent to redeem and repair America. [1]    The secular version of the messiah is, of course, the superhero, and Roth begins his piece recounting a (blessedly) failed animated series called Trump Takeover: The Ultimate Power Trip , in which “Trump was taking over everything and making it better.”    One pitched episode has Trump and his team “’uncovering a global financial conspiracy’ and ends with them triumphantly taking control of the stock market ‘to save the world economy from total ruin.’”    Another, more pertinent example, “’Politically Corrected,’ begins with ‘America … in a state of virtual collapse,’ which is...

Greg Weiner, “The Moralistic Style in American Politics,” National Affairs, No. 41, Fall 2019.   As an addition to the above, Weiner suggests that a “moralistic politics is prone to stalemate because it disdains such instruments of effective political practice as barter and compromise.   Its insistence on its own correctness, elevated to the urgency of the moral plane, makes compromise not merely imprudent but indefensible.   Because of its tendency toward a monomaniacal focus on single issues to the exclusion of others, it cannot engage in horse trading.”   When it comes to the current president, who engages in a moralistic politics, there are any number of ironies.   Perhaps the most obvious is the self-perception as a “deal maker,” which tends to imply “barter and compromise” – a   pragmatism that “sees shades of gray and operates in a world of contradictions and tensions” – and, as a consequence, aims for the so-called “win-win” solution to a pro...

              SOURCES OF INSTABILIITY By way of brief introduction, I am a reader, a somewhat compulsive reader, and what populates this blog are nothing more than my marginal notes on what I’ve read.   That said, there is a framework, one that I’ve drawn from Daniel Bell’s study, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.   In it, Bell quotes Sm M. Lipset as saying, “legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.”   Moreover, Lipset goes on to say, “the extent to which contemporary democratic political democratic system are legitimate depends in large part on the ways the key issues which have historically divided the system have been resolved,” and here I would add resolved if not permanently, once and for all, then at least temporarily.   Implicit in the notion of historic...