This is great. I agree that one of the hidden reasons for Zohran’s success is the fact that he just seems like a fun guy. I sometimes feel like the left got eaten by the old Tumblr blog “your fav is problematic”.
“'The prospects for any renewal will have to be sought in everyday life ⏤ in those circumstances in which people still regularly enter into contact with others.” Where are those places? Daycares and retirement homes, says Jäger. Jesus Christ. That’s fucking depressing. And neighborhoods, adds Jäger, unhelpfully."
Jager is correct. Taking care of the elderly is essential to a full life; it gives purpose and perspective for which there is no substitute. And daycares anchor neighborhoods and connect families to a more visceral degree than even local schools do.
Depressing is a life surrounded by transient, childless adults who have never changed a diaper and don’t know how to talk to someone with dementia.
Got this on my email, and loved reading it. Really cutting to the heart of it in political analysis while still making it accessible, with some very fun one liners.
"A necromancer has been busy" is a great line, might have to find a way to quote this as an intro to one of my stories some day.
This made me think about the idea of satire, too-- and the idea that protest might involve humor (like the big Trump Baby balloon that flew over London a few years ago)
Allthough his name is in fact Dutch, Sloterdijk is a German philosopher. Dutch intellectual culture, empirical and consensual to the core, could never produce a figure like him...
> the party of anti-monopolists and Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide
The Democrats would be a much better and more effective political party than they were if this were true.
The perspective of this piece, and of the book it is reviewing, is irrecoverably European, right down to its confusion about what, exactly, the American party system is and how it differs from the more clearly ideological parties common to European parliaments.
Because unlike Germany’s SDP or Poland’s PiS or even Westminster’s Tories, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have historically stood for much at all. American parties are better analogized to a sort of premade parliamentary coalitions than to the individual parties making it up.
A great deal of the rot accruing in American politics has to do not with the parties becoming more hypocritical, as the quote would suggest, but becoming less so. It was not enough for Democrats to be a vehicle for Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, Spanish-speakers, progressives, public sector workers, healthcare workers, service workers, and professionals. All of these groups and their disparate interests had to submit to the fiction of the omnicause.
Europe’s malaise and America’s are largely different, and more is obscured than learned by comparisons such as these, which brush aside contingent historical events in favor of sweeping ideological narratives full of paper-thin evidence and trite-yet-unconvincing assumptions.
This is great. I agree that one of the hidden reasons for Zohran’s success is the fact that he just seems like a fun guy. I sometimes feel like the left got eaten by the old Tumblr blog “your fav is problematic”.
“'The prospects for any renewal will have to be sought in everyday life ⏤ in those circumstances in which people still regularly enter into contact with others.” Where are those places? Daycares and retirement homes, says Jäger. Jesus Christ. That’s fucking depressing. And neighborhoods, adds Jäger, unhelpfully."
Jager is correct. Taking care of the elderly is essential to a full life; it gives purpose and perspective for which there is no substitute. And daycares anchor neighborhoods and connect families to a more visceral degree than even local schools do.
Depressing is a life surrounded by transient, childless adults who have never changed a diaper and don’t know how to talk to someone with dementia.
Got this on my email, and loved reading it. Really cutting to the heart of it in political analysis while still making it accessible, with some very fun one liners.
"A necromancer has been busy" is a great line, might have to find a way to quote this as an intro to one of my stories some day.
This made me think about the idea of satire, too-- and the idea that protest might involve humor (like the big Trump Baby balloon that flew over London a few years ago)
I don't mean to be nitpicky, but it's Hobsbawm, not Hobswam, and Peter Sloterdijk isn't a "Dutch political theorist," he's a German philosopher.
Allthough his name is in fact Dutch, Sloterdijk is a German philosopher. Dutch intellectual culture, empirical and consensual to the core, could never produce a figure like him...
> the party of anti-monopolists and Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide
The Democrats would be a much better and more effective political party than they were if this were true.
The perspective of this piece, and of the book it is reviewing, is irrecoverably European, right down to its confusion about what, exactly, the American party system is and how it differs from the more clearly ideological parties common to European parliaments.
Because unlike Germany’s SDP or Poland’s PiS or even Westminster’s Tories, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have historically stood for much at all. American parties are better analogized to a sort of premade parliamentary coalitions than to the individual parties making it up.
A great deal of the rot accruing in American politics has to do not with the parties becoming more hypocritical, as the quote would suggest, but becoming less so. It was not enough for Democrats to be a vehicle for Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, Spanish-speakers, progressives, public sector workers, healthcare workers, service workers, and professionals. All of these groups and their disparate interests had to submit to the fiction of the omnicause.
Europe’s malaise and America’s are largely different, and more is obscured than learned by comparisons such as these, which brush aside contingent historical events in favor of sweeping ideological narratives full of paper-thin evidence and trite-yet-unconvincing assumptions.