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Rock Du Jour - 4/29/22 - The New Intellectual Right and J.D. Vance and Exactly Who We're Voting For - Very Important, Folks! (1 Viewer)

The New Pursuit Of Happiness - Walter Berns (Be sure to zoom out in view form)

(I)n the South, Slavery and its vestiges pre-vented the industrialization or "commercialization" of the Southern economy, with the result that not until our own time did Georgia begin to resemble Massachusetts and Atlanta, Boston. To a far greater extent than the other regions of the country, the South remained rural--in its economy, its life, and its tastes--and, in doing so, retained some of the elements of a world not so obviously driven by a Hobbesian fear of violent death and not so keen about its complement, the right of self-preservation; in short, a less comfortable and less prosaic world. From it, therefore, could come pain, cruelty, and violence, but also our poetry and our music--spirituals, jazz, country, bluegrass. And from it, and especially from its Appalachian and other more rural parts, comes today's religious revival and--who knows?--tomorrow's politics. That this should happen, just when the South had, so to speak, rejoined the union, culturally as well as legally, may say something about the kind of happiness being pursued in that union.

 
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rockaction said:
Where The Apolitical Stays Apolitical, Bircher Truther Scumbags: https://time.com/5646632/how-much-water-to-drink/
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Did you put Bircher in the title to get me to respond, you fluoride-sucking weasel?!

If i could, i would hydrate w naught but nature's electrolyte drink - maple sap. I'd run&run&run on grampa's farm all day in summer and gramma would come out on the porch w a big pitcher of cloudy magic water and i'd drink a big glass and run&run&run some more. Didn't realize why til almost 40 yrs later when i read my father's Master's thesis (botany) at my uncle's hunting cabin (where i detoxed from drugs & my Mary's death one winter) and saw a breakdown of phloem/xylem juice and it looked like the ingredients of Gatorade. As soon as sugaring season started, i went driving around to area maple producers and saw that new reverse osmosis technology was quickening the refining process dramatically and gave me my first hope that, somewhere between tree water and syrup there might be a stage where a formula for all-natural maple ade could be marketable ('97 happened to be a time where beverage companies were buying up EVERYTHING). A sugarer in SNewfane Vt got a batch nicely reduced & filtered for me and we had a tasty & nutritious product but, because it was a natural fluid, we couldnt get consistent flavor characteristics that the bevcos wanted and then we ran into a bunch of pasteurization regs. Alas, it was not to be, but i'll still put maple sap against any liquid on a hot, summer day.

 
rockaction said:
But, Polls!

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-blue-seattle-trump-supporters-are-starting-to-come-out-of-hiding/
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If I remember right, Trump didn't campaign in Washington and spent essentially no money here in 2016.   Not really surprising that he has more donors at this stage than at the same point in the 2016 election.    He has no hope of winning here, but certainly an incumbent president should be able to get some donors from just about anywhere.   Looking at the list of donors in the article, it looks like about half are retired.   

I enjoyed this, which is no surprise from Seattle: 

Editor’s note: Due to a high number of comments that violated our terms of service, the thread has been closed to new comments.
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the rover said:
  He has no hope of winning here

I enjoyed this, which is no surprise from Seattle:
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I agree with the first sentence. No. Prayer.

I posted the story because I found that last sentence hilarious and it caught my eye, too. It was also to underscore the lack of just how effective state-by-state polling was last time, which if I'm not mistaken, was fairly varied. 

 
rockaction said:
And no land for the Amash...

https://reason.com/2019/08/21/justin-amash-wants-to-talk-about-process-and-love-but-his-constituents-want-to-talk-about-gun-control/?utm_medium=email
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as one who has voted 3rd-party more than any affiliation, 2020 would actually be a perfect time for an independent (NOT Libertarian - that horse is out da barn) run for Amash. the left would support him because it would hurt Trump and the right embarrassed by Trump/McConnell would have somewhere to go. i dont agree with him on much but, because i've waited my whole life to see a 3rd candidate cross 20%, he'd have my vote if it was Biden/Trump

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Hey @rockactionsome light reading for your next cuppa when you get the chance...

The Executive Power Clause

- Basically the executive power is what we thought it was: real damned limited.
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Thanks for the link, SID. I may be a dilettante, but I've read my Rousseau and Locke and I'm pretty confident I know in what sense the Founders were using the term "executive." The question would be how and when it got so far away from its original menaing, beginning with whom and for what reasons, and expanding and exploding when. Maybe the paper will shed insight into that. 

 
rockaction said:
Thanks for the link, SID. I may be a dilettante, but I've read my Rousseau and Locke and I'm pretty confident I know in what sense the Founders were using the term "executive." The question would be how and when it got so far away from its original meaning, beginning with whom and for what reasons, and expanding and exploding when. Maybe the paper will shed insight into that. 
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Fwiw this is a slightly easier to read version by the author.

What Two Crucial Words in the Constitution Actually Mean

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Fwiw this is a slightly easier to read version by the author.

What Two Crucial Words in the Constitution Actually Mean
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FWIW, I immediately thought of Jackson's concurrence in The Steel Cases as ushering in the constitutional argument behind the new scope of executive power, and lo! -- the author cites it. I'm going to give myself a back-pat and you a thanks for posting.

But I've yet to read the full article. My main two basic historical narratives would be FDR's concentration of experts into the executive branch and its departments, the scope and growth of those departments, administrative law, constitutional issues with executive power. In short, there's a ton of stuff out there that has led to this vision of the executive that in my lay opinion (well, a little more than that) the Founders never intended nor even considererd, aside from Hamilton and few others. 

 
wikkidpissah said:
Be anything but bitter, because nothing betrays one's real truth as well.
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I hope you're talking about him. I've been watching the coordination between journalists and politicos happen since the '90s on the Democratic side. Nothing bitter about the observation, and this has nothing to do with Trump other than that I'd probably be called an anti-anti-Trumper, as the article suggests. 

No use for the man nor his fiercest critics, really. 

 
rockaction said:
I hope you're talking about him. I've been watching the coordination between journalists and politicos happen since the '90s on the Democratic side. Nothing bitter about the observation, and this has nothing to do with Trump other than that I'd probably be called an anti-anti-Trumper, as the article suggests. 

No use for the man nor his fiercest critics, really. 
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Talkin bout Hilly

 
I feel the honest burden of raising me ol' peeps to their graves, but never had much use for either of em. Me 95yo Ma always kept a book on everyone, classic Irish grudgekeeper, and the next time me ol' Da considers the effect of his actions upon others will be the first.

But decades of adult detente had softened my views upon them both and doubt had had even crept in about these sentiments being any more than childish woundlicking. Until i had to return to the nest, that is. Wonderful truthteller, bitterness. Gives up all one's secrets like a psychic Tourettes. My father unhappy about an unsatisfactory (and downright unfair) end to his career, mother worn out by a quarter-century as an invalid. And it seeps, surges, swells even. All the ugliness in their hearts. I don't pity them their fetishes, because they each got to make their own way, even though they had to work like mules to do so. But i pity their souls - so much pain; hope so elusive & tenuous starting out, so desperately regretted along the way out; so elemental their struggle. God bless 'em.

Be anything but bitter, because nothing betrays one's real truth as well.

 
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wikkidpissah said:
I feel the honest burden of raising me ol' peeps to their graves, but never had much use for either of em. Me 95yo Ma always kept a book on everyone, classic Irish grudgekeeper, and the next time me ol' Da considers the effect of his actions upon others will be the first.

But decades of adult detente had softened my views upon them both and doubt had had even crept in about these sentiments being any more than childish woundlicking. Until i had to return to the nest, that is. Wonderful truthteller, bitterness. Gives up all one's secrets like a psychic Tourettes. My father unhappy about an unsatisfactory (and downright unfair) end to his career, mother worn out by a quarter-century as an invalid. And it seeps, surges, swells even. All the ugliness in their hearts. I don't pity them their fetishes, because they each got to make their own way, even though they had to work like mules to do so. But i pity their souls - so much pain; hope so elusive & tenuous starting out, so desperately regretted along the way out; so elemental their struggle. God bless 'em.

Be anything but bitter, because nothing betrays one's real truth as well.
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Wise words. Best to you and your family, wikkid.

 
Taibbi writes new book about the Russia story and its origins

Note on a new book

On the Great Russia Caper

Matt Taibbi

Dec 31

After the holidays, I’ll be starting a new serial book in this space, replacing Untitledgate with The Great Russia Caper.

I spent a good part of the last three years, and much of this past summer and fall, talking to people in and around the Russia investigation. Two themes kept emerging, in conversation with everyone from targets of the investigation to government investigators to reporters bylined on “bombshell” news stories.

One is rank comedy. Elements of this story involve serious abuses of power, but the defining characteristic of the Russia controversy is the proud American ignorance of the main characters. In that respect, it’s similar to the Iraq story. That was about oil, yes, but our Commander-in-Chief also didn’t learn there was a difference between Sunnis and Shiites until a year after the invasion, saying: “I thought Iraqis were Muslims!”

The subtext of Russiagate involves a Dr. Evil-style expansion of the surveillance state and the cynical commandeering of the news media for a xenophobic scare campaign. But the major plot twists are informed by slapstick cluelessness. 

The Russia “expert” whose dossier cripples a presidency doesn’t speak Russian (and hasn’t been there since the Buffalo Bills played in a Super Bowl). The FBI director has never heard of Gazprom. The ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee warms up for hearings on Russian interference by reading “Tolstoy and Nabokov.” 

National security officials explaining the need to arm Ukraine invoke the specter of communism, dead for thirty years; the former head of the DNC worries the “communists” are “dictating the terms of the debate”; belief that the Cold War is still on runs so strong that intelligence officials blame Russia for mysterious “acoustic attacks” on American diplomats in China, Cuba, and Uzbekistan. 

The idea of a Deep State plot to undermine Donald Trump is popular in Republican circles, but all this lunacy at least somewhat undermines that analysis. Russiagate turns out to be impossible to understand minus the element of sincere, if misguided or insane, belief. Investigators and then press figures reasoned themselves into one proposition, only to end up on a years-long roller-coaster embracing pee tapes and acoustic brain attacks and killer Putin-dolphins (trained for the inevitable trans-polar Russian assault). 

A section of the recently-released report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz exemplifies how key players became captive to their own mind loops. 

Horowitz found out key assertions about Trump-Russia collusion appeared to come from Russian oligarch and metals baron Oleg Deripaska, who in 2016 employed ex-spy Christopher Steele to help him in a lawsuit against Trump aide Paul Manafort. This was the same Deripaska whose ostensible ties to Russian intelligence would end up being central to Trump-Russia collusion theories, as he reportedly received polling data from the Trump campaign through a middleman.  

In other words: when information was going to OlegDeripaska, he was an FSB villain. When it came from Deripaska, it was trusted. Why? Horowitz quoted counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap:

Why the Russians, and [Deripaska] is supposed to be close, very close to the Kremlin, why the Russians would try to denigrate an opponent that the intel community later said they were in favor of who didn’t really have a chance at winning, I’m struggling with… I know from my Intelligence Community work: they favored Trump, they’re trying to denigrate Clinton, and they wanted to sow chaos. I don’t know why you’d run a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side. 

To dig into one of the most serious investigative questions the country had ever faced – the possibility that a presidential candidate was in league with foreign intelligence – the FBI turned to an ex-spy with a reputation for “poor judgment” and a “lack of self-awareness” who happened to be on the payroll of both the rival presidential campaign and a Russian plutocrat pal of Vladimir Putin. Asked why they had confidence in this person and his sources, the sincere answer was, “Why would they lie?”

Intelligence officials launched an investigation based on a series of assumptions, then used those assumptions as a reason not to question the assumptions. As one congressional investigator put it to me, “You can’t make this #### up.”

The second major theme is the other shoe finally dropping on a War on Terror domestic spying machine dating back decades, and reconstructed in the Bush-Cheney era. The scandal is not that agencies like the CIA and NSA decided on bogus pretexts to conduct broad-scale intrusive surveillance on a presidential candidate like Trump. It’s that they do this to everybody.

While the hubris in the way security officials felt so little compunction about injecting themselves into a presidential race is certainly telling, the larger story is the broad application of secret tools that appeared in this one case.  

Short of assassination, much of the domestic spying kit-bag came out in Russiagate: FISA, National Security Letters, confidential informants, monitoring of journalists, systematic illegal leaks of classified intelligence, the busting open of attorney-client communications, disinformation through the press, the non-discoverable use of counterintelligence tools in criminal prosecutions (i.e. “parallel construction”), even spying on members of congress. 

There’s no way for Americans, and especially progressives, to really appreciate what the Russia story means without going back to the domestic spying programs first exposed by reporters like Seymour Hersh in the mid-seventies. 

Originally tabbed the “Son of Watergate,” Hersh’s December 1974 report about “huge” spying operations – detailed in an internal CIA document known as the “Family Jewels” – led to revelations of wide-scale domestic surveillance of antiwar and black liberation movements, assassination attempts, misinformation campaigns, surveillance of reporters, a mail-opening program, human experimentation, and other activities so revolting that Henry Kissinger, not exactly a shrinking violent when it comes to such authoritarian stuff, called it the “horrors book.” Public disgust reached the point where there were calls for the abolition of spy agencies in general. 

But a second backlash after Watergate never happened. News agencies, concerned that investigative reporting had gone “too far” after unseating a president, backed off the domestic spy story. The Pulitzer Committee quietly decided not to consider Hersh’s report, because it was “over-written, overplayed, under-researched and underproven.” Of course, every last detail of the “underproven” story would turn out to be true, but that wouldn’t be known for sure until 2007, when the “Family Jewels” were finally declassified. By then, the agencies had regrouped, and the spy programs reinvigorated. 

When he returned to the White House as Vice President, onetime Ford administration official **** Cheney rebuilt the secrecy bureaucracy. Intensely concerned with restoring the powers the executive branch lost in the seventies of his bitter experience, Cheney armed all the new or revived spying programs with a protective Catch-22. Extreme measures undertaken on national security grounds would henceforth also be protected from legal challenge on the same national security grounds. 

Anyone hoping to contest any of these activities – secret FISA monitoring, inclusion on a no-fly or even an assassination list, the receipt of a National Security Letter from the FBI demanding access to communications information, an ordinary criminal prosecution buttressed by secret evidence – first had to win a difficult battle to prove that any of these things had even taken place. 

Once past that hurdle, there would be a second battle to see the government’s reasons for taking these actions. Then, another battle to win the right to contest them. And so on.

Throughout the last three years, this pattern has repeated, often in absurd fashion. The lowlight was probably Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of a series of Russians connected to the Internet Research Agency. 

When lawyers for one of the defendants unexpectedly showed up in court, Mueller declared millions of pages of non-classified documents “sensitive,” and obtained a protective order preventing defense counsel sharing discovery evidence – with their own clients! Nobody in the ostensibly “liberal media” even blinked at this dystopian insanity. 

This is the metaphor still playing itself out as Connecticut Attorney General John Durham winds up his investigation of the investigation. We’re still at the stage of fighting over how much the public is entitled to learn what secret measures were undertaken on its behalf. That it takes this long and is this difficult for even the President of the United States to learn what tools were used to investigate him should be an enormous red flag, even to those who despise Trump. 

It’s my hope that if people see the long background of how such tools have been used against less prominent targets – from Muslims on the Watch List to inner-city drug defendants tried in “tip and lead” cases to Internet companies fighting long court battles just to publicly fight the secret subpoenas they’ve received from the FBI – they might start to think differently about this story.

Russiagate is like the Iraq story in another sense. Even after we found out there were no WMDs, the intellectual argument for pre-emptive war remained. The pretext vanished but the idea persisted; we’re still over there. In the same way, the core ideas of the Russia caper are almost sure to survive Donald Trump.

In early 2017, the outgoing Obama government issued an Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference. Coverage focused on the notion that a foreign country had helped elect Trump, but the paper pushed other themes. It talked about Russian determination to fuel “radical discontent” and “dissatisfaction” among us, in order to “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.” 

The paper previewed concepts pundits would continue hammering for years:

“Discord” in America is foreign-inspired;

Complaints about financial inequality, wars, the inefficacy of American democracy, and other problems are also fueled by foreigners;   

There is danger in allowing crossover between the left and right populist movements appealing to these complaints;

The free press and an unregulated Internet are the devil’s playgrounds, and the vigilance of experts is needed to protect us from foreign “disinformation.”

These ideas have pushed us into an experience straight out of Orwell: a dramatic and almost instantaneous flipping of popular assumptions. Self-described “progressives” who just a decade ago rallied behind the Dixie Chicks now gobble up scare tracts written in faux-Cyrillic texts about “assets” in our midst. The same terror before unseen threats that gripped small-town Americans after 9/11 has now conquered our urban upper classes. Donald Trump is not sufficient to explain this.

Even if public opinion doesn’t change, it feels worth writing a history of this madness. I hope future generations will be sane enough to disbelieve it. 

Part one, next, begins with the Family Jewels, a War on Terror primer, and a pair of lawsuits. 

 
rockaction said:
The subtext of Russiagate involves a Dr. Evil-style expansion of the surveillance state and the cynical commandeering of the news media for a xenophobic scare campaign. But the major plot twists are informed by slapstick cluelessness. 

The Russia “expert” whose dossier cripples a presidency doesn’t speak Russian (and hasn’t been there since the Buffalo Bills played in a Super Bowl). The FBI director has never heard of Gazprom. The ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee warms up for hearings on Russian interference by reading “Tolstoy and Nabokov.” 

National security officials explaining the need to arm Ukraine invoke the specter of communism, dead for thirty years; the former head of the DNC worries the “communists” are “dictating the terms of the debate”; belief that the Cold War is still on runs so strong that intelligence officials blame Russia for mysterious “acoustic attacks” on American diplomats in China, Cuba, and Uzbekistan. 

The idea of a Deep State plot to undermine Donald Trump is popular in Republican circles, but all this lunacy at least somewhat undermines that analysis. Russiagate turns out to be impossible to understand minus the element of sincere, if misguided or insane, belief. Investigators and then press figures reasoned themselves into one proposition, only to end up on a years-long roller-coaster embracing pee tapes and acoustic brain attacks and killer Putin-dolphins (trained for the inevitable trans-polar Russian assault). 
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The one thing I'll say for this is that I think there is a POV from Russia, I mean average writers and reporters and academics, who see certain stereotypes and mistakes on the part of America's IC, politicians and journalists on this. It's not talked about much here or nationally, really almost at all. I don't think that lessens the impact of the Mueller report or the two Horowitz reports (going in either direction, because both contain information both helpful and hurtful for the investigation). - I read an observation recently from a Russian journalist (Navalny) that the impact that Putin wants is the impression of Russian influence not so much the influence itself. And I don't think that's just a question of Steele's sources (ie Russians injecting disinformation into the US IC via a well trusted spy), it's also a question of how easy it was to ping Papadopoulos and set off a truly massive investigation with long term effects for relatively little investment. I really don't know if this is where Taibbi is coming from but I do know or sense his POV often comes from that Russian community.

 
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https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/legal-history-epidemics-america

Office of Communications: How can states legally close establishments and shut down activities within their jurisdiction?

Professor Gordon: Such powerful and sometimes oppressive responses are made possible by the long-lived rigor of the “police power” that is vested in states. American federalism, the divided sovereignty that splits national and local government responsibilities, means that more than 2,600 local boards of health are the front line. The national government has power at the borders, but once inside the country, that power evaporates. Even when President Trump ordered cruise ship passengers and evacuees from China to be quarantined, local administrators actually administered and managed that process.

The police power has proven among the most powerful tools of government, especially during epidemics. As legal historian Michael Willrich put it in his aptly titled book Pox, “Epidemic disease, like war, is the health of the state.” Defined as the authority to ensure the health, welfare and safety of a state population, the police power has sustained drastic measures to combat epidemics – so drastic, that key rights of individual liberty and bodily integrity have been trampled.

 
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Ilov80s said:
So sad and a reminder of the power of penicillin to change the course of lives and the history of humanity. That might be only topped by poor Franklin Pierce's young son being killed in a train accident just prior to him being sworn in. Pierce refused to be sworn in on The Bible due to the tragedy. 
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Wow. That's stunning. I didn't know that fact about Pierce and being sworn in. That's some deep stuff. I also didn't know Lincoln's son had died of typhoid fever or something like it until I came across SID's posting. 

 
rockaction said:
Wow. That's stunning. I didn't know that fact about Pierce and being sworn in. That's some deep stuff. I also didn't know Lincoln's son had died of typhoid fever or something like it until I came across SID's posting. 
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Weird too because he was already elected however by the time he was inaugurated, he was no longer the same person that voters had chosen.  

 
Ilov80s said:
So sad and a reminder of the power of penicillin to change the course of lives and the history of humanity. That might be only topped by poor Franklin Pierce's young son being killed in a train accident just prior to him being sworn in. Pierce refused to be sworn in on The Bible due to the tragedy. 
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My old boss in the political think tank world, a very conservative guy (natch) used to ask those who bemoaned technological advances writ large one question: Would you prefer to go back to a time when there was no penicillin?

It was a little hyperbolic and straw mannish, but they got the point, especially the more radical of the tree huggers that campuses naturally attract.

 
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And there are and were certainly right-wing luddites to offset the left-wing tree huggers, too. Russell Kirk was notorious for bemoaning the invention of the automobile. He was such an agrarian luddite that he ran as a socialist in 1944 for President. Won the nom, IIRC.

 
there are few things more pitiful than those who seek to cram toothpaste back in the tube. it is to us to create a framework for embracing change, not only for the sake of progress, but the sake of our traditions.

 
wikkidpissah said:
there are few things more pitiful than those who seek to cram toothpaste back in the tube. it is to us to create a framework for embracing change, not only for the sake of progress, but the sake of our traditions.
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Referring to what movement? The process towards federal responses to pandemics? Or regarding technology and knowledge in general?

If it's about federal responses to pandemics, The Commish and I are discussing that in the timschochet apology thread. The Z Machine has also chimed in. We all agree that measures should be undertaken by the federal government in response to pandemics. How to assure the constitutionality of things and thereby, the spirit of America, is the question. I am less sanguine about specific means for fighting pandemics by federal fiat or executive authority staying reserved for pandemics only than those two, but there should be at least a federal framework to combat scourges. I was thinking that President Trump could make certain duties heretofore granted to the States federal and argue that the cross-doctrinal imperative of Justice Jackson's test in the Steel Mill Cases of 1952 applied to federalism writ large was the case before us, the necessary one.

But I'm not sure if that flies. The police power is explicitly granted by the Constitution to the States. It would seem a contentious amendment process would be in order, but we have neither the time nor votes to get it passed. Unless we groundswell.

But enough. You might have been talking just about technology and its discontents.

 
yeah, i shoulda qualified that.

i am paying NO attention to the politics of the pandemic. everything personal & political i've heard in that regard has been reactive and i havent the patience. we will stop & start, spend way too much for way too little, make 1000s of hasty assumptions, it will be gamed as soon what game that is can be worked out because there is no advantage an American wont take and bureaucracies, established by/as temporary measures, will become ingrained as monumental boondoggles.  :yawn:

i was reacting to the Coolidge speech & your comment about luddites. Honor is not about establishing who is more honorable or who determines what is honorable and what is not, but about creating frameworks both moral and effective by which any citizen can succeed. That is why there are no honorable Republicans and almost all the honorable Dems are fools who can barely help themselves

 
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wikkidpissah said:
i was reacting to the Coolidge speech & your comment about luddites. Honor is not about establishing who is more honorable or who determines what is honorable and what is not, but about creating frameworks both moral and effective by which any citizen can succeed. That is why there are no honorable Republicans and almost all the honorable Dems are fools who can barely help themselves
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I could not hear the Coolidge speech. Perhaps I need to turn the darn music off and use the headphones solo. I think I get what you're saying about frameworks both moral and effective by which citizens can succeed. I am a disaffected voter, too; there don't seem like many morally edifying yet effective frameworks by which citizens can thrive. I'm wondering if it ever truly was that way, or whether the victory of WWII offered promises and limitless horizons that were destined for failure. The 18th and 19th century saw slavery and unequal suffrage and income inequality. The aristocracy of the South and the industrialization of North created and cemented inequalities of race and class. The 20th Century heeded the calls to the end of these things with universal suffrage and the end of slavery combined with minimum wage laws and worker protections, but it still saw the new immigrant class and the lower classes as vile, foul creatures depending from where one came. The elite were still cemented in class-keeping colleges that were finishing schools and the classes subsequent commercial exploits after these finishing schools were often unavailable to the common man. This went on for the better part of four decades until the war, a war that saw many lost, families torn apart by death and grief. But the losses and grief might have been offset by the necessity of the heavy nationalization, patriotism, and national unity that touched both the aristocratic and the poor, who suffered these losses and sacrifices and mobilized together, if not together at the dinner table, then together in spirit and towards a common end. And the war, then over, promised the creature comforts while still retaining a sense of duty, of togetherness, it would seem.

Really, WWII was a leveler of sorts like we'd never seen as a country. 

Then the boomers came and creature comforts became the ends to which we aspired, sacrifice for country was questioned vehemently among the middle classes who had already suffered so much loss twenty years earlier before the next big foreign excursion, and an entire way of duty to others was placed in upheaval for the gratification of self.

It would seem America has always been a country where opportunity is rarely extended to all as worthy of dignity for dignity's sake, that is. I think maybe you were born at a rare time; when the dignity of American citizen qua citizen was at its peak, extended to all in the after effects of WWII. But I'm not sure this was ever the norm. Citizenship and virtue took a backseat in the drafting of the Constitution according to many; let commerce be elevated and statecraft as soulcraft be relegated to the states, the small entities. But an overwhelming explosion of the federal left little room for the states, these homogeneous pockets of Rousseauian virtue, and commerce ran amok everywhere, leveling all in its path. It was supposed to be constrained by the structures and cornices and awnings delicately placed on the hopes of humanity, but those supports were kicked out in the twentieth century by progress, by those who did not see the importance of the structures themselves, not as ends to abstract goals, but goals only when used as means, by practice. By practice we stumble into our citizen roles in America. We are an unusual lot designed that way from our forefathers, our protestant guides. We are that lot of protestors, dissenters, hardy in spirit, kowtowing to few, taken by none. This puts us in a conundrum of fidelity to ourselves and deference to citizen requirements, the disavowal of which paradoxically makes us better citizens. E unibus pluram, as it were.

Just something to think about.

 
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a big difference between you & i, and possibly the classical liberal & the progressive in general, is that i dont look back for laws. merely lessons. those who are racing away from God now are those who felt all along that we always should have been racing away from our animal selves and that it was the animal flaws in the God put to us which made us see that He was not godly, but manly. the race for us was always from beastly avarice and the question of holiness was in gaining the ability to see that life is better given than had. that whole Perfectability of Man thang...

Honor starts with a code, of course, but lives in it being revised to make things ever harder for the strong. relaxing upon one's gains is an understandable but paltry option. would a species with its best interest at heart actually have its best & brightest stop at proving themselves and not extend them to provide for others? I understand rights as well as anyone, and i simply do not understand exercising one's own to be superior to extending those of everyone.

 
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