looks like the supreme court thoroughly killed the voting rights act

curious as to what the future looks like in this garbage ass country

soon there will be...two Americas

nice

You mean a North and a South America????  

Here's another thought. Federalism is antiquated and the Founding Fathers were all 35 year old idiots.

Best way to fix this country would be to start a new one. The constitution fucking sucks, as do almost all of our conservative, undemocratic institutions.

tru

chrondog wrote:Here's another thought. Federalism is antiquated and the Founding Fathers were all 35 year old idiots.

Hard disagree. I think a successful social democratic movement needs to take the Enlightenment principles of the Republic's funding constitutional documents very seriously. I always think of socialism as an extension and the fullest expression of those humanistic principles.

Drove through Indiana today and on an overpass there was a group of people waving American flags and Trump flags.

Made me think of this thread!

indiana sucks

It really may be the most irredeemable state in my eyes. At least the ex-confederate deep southern states are culturally unique and sort of interesting in an anthropological sense or whatever. Indiana is just a boring, dumb, racist shit hole.

guys have a little pride. white guilt is corny

i literally grew up close to one of the deadliest street corners in chicago with a afro-puerto rican father and the most racist shit ive ever seen in my life is woke progressivism

Take it to the racist Midwest uncles thread edgy mc edgerson

WP64 wrote:

chrondog wrote:Here's another thought. Federalism is antiquated and the Founding Fathers were all 35 year old idiots.

Hard disagree. I think a successful social democratic movement needs to take the Enlightenment principles of the Republic's funding constitutional documents very seriously. I always think of socialism as an extension and the fullest expression of those humanistic principles.

Even harder disagree. "Enlightenment thinking" might be cool if you divorce it completely from its historical context, but it's actually fundamentally colonial, sexist, racist, oligarchic, and undemocratic. That the thinkers who founded the Republic ignored any notion of equality to create a government that benefitted themselves and cloaked it in universalist language was an unbelievable sham. That the people who helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen considered "man" and "citizen" to be such a narrow category of people demonstrates how hollow all their "thinking" was. It should be discarded because they don't have credibility.

You could "well, actually..." everyone in an ivory tower way to say "Enlightenment thinking is actually humanist and good, it was just corrupted by bad people," but you'd be telling on yourself. People are pretty bad and they will take bad ideologies and implement them badly. Fundamentally, our founding documents don't have any mechanisms to enforce fairness or equality. The founders left implementation up to a bunch of bigots. The Supreme Court is not an institutional check on minority rights, it's whatever the people who sit on it want to do because the constitution gives them zero duties or requirements. Trump helped showed that all our "strong institutions" are just operating on a whim. Political appointees control ethics and criminal investigations—those are not strong institutions.

Giving them credit for getting the universalist language while implementing none of that and then incorporating the rights of minorities over the course of centuries? Not a passing grade at all, I'm afraid. We absolutely don't need to reference intellectual movements that are hundreds of years old and try to convince modern people they are the way forward today. We can bypass all that BS and go straight to defining the next generation.

Ned Braden wrote:Take it to the racist Midwest uncles thread edgy mc edgerson

college educated white man suggests a man of color who grew up in one of the toughest ghettos in chicago takes his opinion to the "racist midwest uncle" thread. let me guess you'd have no problem calling a black conservative who comes from a similar situation an uncle tom either. you may not have come from our context, but academia, leftist hive mind and salon articles trump all even a lived experience. what a world

This thread is about voting rights dude. Wanting the country we live in to remain a functional democracy is hardly “woke progressivism,” and you coming into the thread with that language smacks of lazy trolling. It’s not interesting.

Ned Braden wrote:This thread is about voting rights dude. Wanting the country we live in to remain a functional democracy is hardly “woke progressivism,” and you coming into the thread with that language smacks of lazy trolling. It’s not interesting.

so the elitist hot takes itt about indiana being a "racist, dumb, boring shithole" were profound or something? how dare anyone wave an american flag or be maga. its as if coastal / big city elites havent been shitting on people from "flyover country" for decades and some of said people werent fed up with that when they voted trump into office. maybe the way you fix this country is by showing people with differing opinions and backgrounds some respect instead of tripling down on tribalism.

I mean, that’s actually a good point, and if you would’ve made it instead of rolling out far right authoritarian talking points du jour and accusing us of “corny” white guilt (LOL), maybe I would’ve responded to it rather than telling you to fuck off.

chrondog wrote:Even harder disagree. "Enlightenment thinking" might be cool if you divorce it completely from its historical context, but it's actually fundamentally colonial, sexist, racist, oligarchic, and undemocratic. That the thinkers who founded the Republic ignored any notion of equality to create a government that benefitted themselves and cloaked it in universalist language was an unbelievable sham. That the people who helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen considered "man" and "citizen" to be such a narrow category of people demonstrates how hollow all their "thinking" was. It should be discarded because they don't have credibility.

It isn't a debate about deifying the Founders or venerating their all-seeing wisdom, this is actually just an epistemic battle. Rectifying historic crimes does not mean we should abandon universalist principles in our politics. Quite the opposite. In the academy, it has been en vogue to problematize the Enlightenment for a very, very long time now. For Adorno & Horkheimer, the seeds of the Holocaust can be found in the Enlightenment's separation of man and nature, for example. You can almost summarize Foucault's entire intellectual project as an extended critique of Enlightenment thought. The proliferation of women and gender's studies and critical race theory all comes from this same critique.

I just find it very dissatisfying, tbh. I am not sure where it leaves us. I'll acknowledge the validity of their criticisms but the consequences of scraping the project entirely and abandoning the entire revolutionary and modern tradition is unthinkable for me. It just seems like a useless step backwards and a fetishization of some pristine past that never actually existed anyway.

Madrox Reloaded wrote:so the elitist hot takes itt about indiana being a "racist, dumb, boring shithole" were profound or something? maybe the way you fix this country is by showing people with differing opinions and backgrounds some respect instead of tripling down on tribalism.

Sure. I agree with you. It was just a throwaway post in a thread that very few people read anyway. I don't know if there is a social basis for my politics in the State of Indiana but I am willing to grant that is probably easier to find it there than San Francisco or Boston.

perhaps a more nuanced way to say that indiana sucks is that the right-wing, christianist government that has entrenched itself in that state due to decades of "rugged individualism" and a refusal to invest in its communities after the rust belt collapse has resulted in a culture of christofascist fear of the marginalized other and anyone purporting to advocate for those groups. it manifests itself as poor, scared white people voting for republicans who ex- or implicitly advocate for the destruction of those groups, which reads to outsiders as indiana being a racist shit hole.

it does negate the solid of amount of great people fighting for change there, because what's most visible is the politics of exclusion that's come to define the place.

but also, waving an american flag while wearing maga gear feels like a threat these days. i just spent a few days out in the mountains of VA where there's still a staggering amount of trump signs, including some that say "trump 2021" or "trump for virginia 2022." they leave them there or put up new ones to be confrontational.

WP64 wrote:

chrondog wrote:Even harder disagree. "Enlightenment thinking" might be cool if you divorce it completely from its historical context, but it's actually fundamentally colonial, sexist, racist, oligarchic, and undemocratic. That the thinkers who founded the Republic ignored any notion of equality to create a government that benefitted themselves and cloaked it in universalist language was an unbelievable sham. That the people who helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen considered "man" and "citizen" to be such a narrow category of people demonstrates how hollow all their "thinking" was. It should be discarded because they don't have credibility.

It isn't a debate about deifying the Founders or venerating their all-seeing wisdom, this is actually just an epistemic battle. Rectifying historic crimes does not mean we should abandon universalist principles in our politics. Quite the opposite. In the academy, it has been en vogue to problematize the Enlightenment for a very, very long time now. For Adorno & Horkheimer, the seeds of the Holocaust can be found in the Enlightenment's separation of man and nature, for example. You can almost summarize Foucault's entire intellectual project as an extended critique of Enlightenment thought. The proliferation of women and gender's studies and critical race theory all comes from this same critique.

I just find it very dissatisfying, tbh. I am not sure where it leaves us. I'll acknowledge the validity of their criticisms but the consequences of scraping the project entirely and abandoning the entire revolutionary and modern tradition is unthinkable for me. It just seems like a useless step backwards and a fetishization of some pristine past that never actually existed anyway.

As someone who studied history, I firmly believe no one gives one fuck about history and it's mostly pointless to talk about.

Maybe. But it isn't about the collection of historical facts or the sociology of knowledge. It is about having a shared conception of History as the dialectic movement of human consciousness.

It is not at all coincidental that almost all of the major counter-Enlightenment thinkers and public intellectuals in Europe are conservatives and neo-restorationists. This is what separates the contemporary and mainstream European far right from classical interwar Fascist movements. The latter were modernists who conceived of themselves as neo-Jacobins who were advancing the revolutionary project whereas the contemporary right are conservative reactionaries obsessed with the virility of Medieval European men and fetishize the invented traditions and custom of their racially-defined ancestors.

Socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and Fascism are all different responses and reactions to the historical unfolding of the Enlightenment. They are the basic schools of political thought around which you have to orient yourself. There really is no alternative, imo. People who try to relativize these universal concepts are often just being pigheaded. Rather than trying to relativize European history, we should be expanding our understanding of the Enlightenment so that we can actually understand it is as the truly global phenomenon that it was.

WP64 wrote:Maybe. But it isn't about the collection of historical facts or the sociology of knowledge. It is about having a shared conception of History as the dialectic movement of human consciousness.

It is not at all coincidental that almost all of the major counter-Enlightenment thinkers and public intellectuals in Europe are conservatives and neo-restorationists. This is what separates the contemporary and mainstream European far right from classical interwar Fascist movements. The latter were modernists who conceived of themselves as neo-Jacobins who were advancing the revolutionary project whereas the contemporary right are conservative reactionaries obsessed with the virility of Medieval European men and fetishize the invented traditions and custom of their racially-defined ancestors.

Socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and Fascism are all different responses and reactions to the historical unfolding of the Enlightenment. They are the basic schools of political thought around which you have to orient yourself. There really is no alternative, imo. People who try to relativize these universal concepts are often just being pigheaded. Rather than trying to relativize European history, we should be expanding our understanding of the Enlightenment so that we can actually understand it is as the truly global phenomenon that it was.

The alternative is recognizing that most modern (read: post-war) people don't have a historiographic theory of change and don't operate within the "shared conception of History as the dialectic movement of human consciousness". That is most often an outside imposition by elites after the fact. Technology is a much more central organizing aspect of modern political reactionaries than history. And the modern notion of "history" is extremely ahistorical (though I would also argue that the appeal to history in the past has often been based on mythmaking and false histories).

With all the muck running through our current political discourse and the pitiful historical education in this country, there isn't knowledge or space to reference hundreds of years of Western intellectual history when talking to people about a the current moment which is basically unrecognizable to anyone born before 1950.

I would worry a lot more about building new histories and ideologies than trying to appeal those past movements. I think these discussions about intellectual history are cool for you and I (and would be a lot cooler if I still read anything interesting and had something to contribute), but don't mean much to the types of people seek/need to influence.