General Politics thread

This column is directed at all the high school football players around the country who are pulling a Kaepernick — kneeling during their pregame national anthems to protest systemic racism. I’m going to try to persuade you that what you’re doing is extremely counterproductive.

When Europeans first settled this continent they had two big thoughts. The first was that God had called them to create a good and just society on this continent. The second was that they were screwing it up.

The early settlers put intense moral pressure on themselves. They filled the air with angry jeremiads about how badly things were going and how much they needed to change.

This harsh self-criticism was the mainstream voice that defined American civilization. As the historian Perry Miller wrote, “Under the guise of this mounting wail of sinfulness, this incessant and never successful cry for repentance, the Puritans launched themselves upon the process of Americanization.”

By 1776, this fusion of radical hope and radical self-criticism had become the country’s civic religion. This civic religion was based on a moral premise — that all men are created equal — and pointed toward a vision of a promised land — a place where your family or country of origin would have no bearing on your opportunities.

Over the centuries this civic religion fired a fervent desire for change. Every significant American reform movement was shaped by it. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not entirely unworthy of its almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country.”
Martin Luther King Jr. sang the national anthem before his “I Have a Dream” speech and then quoted the Declaration of Independence within it.

This American creed gave people a sense of purpose and a high ideal to live up to. It bonded them together. Whatever their other identities — Irish-American, Jewish American, African-American — they were still part of the same story.

Over the years, America’s civic religion was nurtured the way all religions are nurtured: by sharing moments of reverence. Americans performed the same rituals on Thanksgiving and July 4; they sang the national anthem and said the Pledge in unison; they listened to the same speeches on national occasions and argued out the great controversies of our history.

All of this evangelizing had a big effect. As late as 2003, Americans were the most patriotic people on earth, according to the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.

Recently, the civic religion has been under assault. Many schools no longer teach American history, so students never learn the facts and tenets of their creed. A globalist mentality teaches students they are citizens of the world rather than citizens of America.

Critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates have arisen, arguing that the American reality is so far from the American creed as to negate the value of the whole thing. The multiculturalist mind-set values racial, gender and ethnic identities and regards national identities as reactionary and exclusive. There’s been a sharp decline in American patriotism. Today, only 52 percent of Americans are “extremely proud” of their country, a historical low. Among those 18 to 29, only 34 percent are extremely proud. Americans know less about their history and creed and are less likely to be fervent believers in it.

Sitting out the anthem takes place in the context of looming post-nationalism. When we sing the national anthem, we’re not commenting on the state of America. We’re fortifying our foundational creed. We’re expressing gratitude for our ancestors and what they left us. We’re expressing commitment to the nation’s ideals, which we have not yet fulfilled.

If we don’t transmit that creed through shared displays of reverence we will have lost the idea system that has always motivated reform. We will lose the sense that we’re all in this together. We’ll lose the sense of shared loyalty to ideas bigger and more transcendent than our own short lives.

If these common rituals are insulted, other people won’t be motivated to right your injustices because they’ll be less likely to feel that you are part of their story. People will become strangers to one another and will interact in cold instrumentalist terms.

You will strengthen Donald Trump’s ethnic nationalism, which erects barriers between Americans and which is the dark opposite of America’s traditional universal nationalism.I hear you when you say you are unhappy with the way things are going in America. But the answer to what’s wrong in America is America — the aspirations passed down generation after generation and sung in unison week by week.

We have a crisis of solidarity. That makes it hard to solve every other problem we have. When you stand and sing the national anthem, you are building a little solidarity, and you’re singing a radical song about a radical place.


TL;DR old man just (willfully) can't understand these punks today

The focus of my own cultural pessimism is this dumb, lazy, chatty style of writing that's become so prevalent, incidentally. This sounds like the opening statement to a ninth grader's term paper.  And not a particularly bright one at that.

'Recently' his ideal conception of things has come under attack. 'Critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates' have arisen. This is hardly recent and new, is it?

Anyway, it would be asking too much from a moralizing simpleton like Brooks to actually think it necessary to construct an argument as to why internationalism is to be depecrated.

His rosy view of an ardent nationalism, accepted as multi-ethnic while yet anxiously occluding meaningful expression of that multiplicity, reminds me of a section from a study of the Third World's place in the Cold War by Odd Arne Westad that I can't, as with five or six other books, somehow finish:

This is the paradigm inarticulately expounded by Brooks for his own nation, and which I'd argue humanity will either reach a stage of civilization too high for, or destroy itself, in which anthems will cease to be of concern anyway.

On the Westad excerpt, consider also the oh-so respectful defenses of Khizr and Humayun Khan by elitists like Brooks, 'liberal' and 'conservative' (the dyad bearing no material distinction).  The Khans are deemed worthy of basic respect commensurate with the extent to which they associate themselves uncritically with the American state’s spiritual and material project, which happens to be that of maintaining and extending their global system.  This is preferable to a state engaged in internal and external genocide, and yet there seems something more worth desiderating in a culture which treats violent death in a neoimperial venture as the ne plus ultra of citizenship.

If he can't make his point without resorting to some sort of idealized, revisionist U.S. history in the first paragraph, maybe it's not actually that great a point.  Plus, it's just nonsense to claim that these protests somehow represent a lack of understanding or respect for the power of national symbols.  On the contrary, their power is exactly why they are being used to challenge the country to do fucking better.  If Brooks really believes the horseshit flowing from his keyboard, he ought to be able to recognize that.

My other main beef is with whom he addresses the piece to.  If you believe it is some great travesty to use the flag/anthem as a piece of protest (I don't, but if you did), then maybe there is a reasonable argument to be made that a millionaire athlete with other large platforms available to them should be voicing their beliefs in a different way.  But that's not what Brooks does.  He punches down at high school and college athletes.  "Don't use one of the very few contexts in which older generations and a more privileged population might bother to pay attention to your actions.  It hurts my feelings regarding the American mythology!  Also, you are probably too stupid to understand what you are talking about anyway."  Fuck that guy.

Yeah that's the thing with this article. A good point probably could have been made that what Kaepernick and others are going for could easily fit within the tradition of self-critical patriotism, and that there might be a big lost opportunity in not doing so. But it's bogged down in Brooks' focusing on some multi-culti strawman nonsense that completely misses the point.

I just don't quite follow why they're having to acknowledge this right now. It's patently obvious that the bill was passed because everyone was terrified of the negative campaign ads their challengers (of either party) could run saying they voted against 9/11 victims' families and not because of any deep ideological commitment to the bill (its critics have been speaking from both sides of the aisle from the beginning). It's also obvious that this "why didn't anyone tell us this bill might have negative consequences?" is pure B.S.

It seems like what you ought to do is what they clearly were planning on doing anyway, which is neuter the bill during the lame duck session. You don't engage the issue before then. Are there critics from multiple institutions and branches of government writing scary letters? It's still hardly a major national story. You just issue noncommittal statements about looking into these criticisms. Nobody expects Congressfolk to say more than that. It seems like a really bizarre shooting-oneself-in-the-foot act to launch into this "Why did nobody tell us this was a dumb idea?" routine?

All I can hypothesize is two things. One, somehow they didn't really believe the veto override would happen, and so were just trusting that the thing would get vetoed and they could trumpet how the Obama administration is refusing to support the victims and/or is sucking up to Islamists. And the bill getting passed has now put things into motion that are going to take firmer root before the lame duck session will allow them to wrangle them back under control (though I haven't seem any evidence yet that this is the case), an action which will make their newfound resistance to the bill seem much worse.

The second is more of a conspiracy theory, which is that the Tea Party side of the GOP genuinely wants to be able to create a narrative of Federal incompetence, and therefore making almost all of Congress look foolish serves their broader agenda. Of course, McConnell has an antagonist relationship with the Tea Party, so this seems decidedly far-fetched.

Or, another thought: has one of those letters of criticism not necessarily made the national stage but has gone viral among military and veteran voters, who now are turning against their representatives in ways that could hurt their individual campaigns, necessitating the damage control we're seeing.

Usually when people are worried that the country could tear itself apart, they are concerned that their relative social status will be undermined. No progress is worth fighting for, whether it is practically attainable or not. All change must be incremental, to make sure that ships floating on top don't take on too much water (the biggest ships will never capsize).

It hinders that progress by portraying the nation as the enemy of progress rather than the engine thereof, a very pre-Civil War attitude if you ask me.

Whoa. According the articles, only 37% of eligible voters turned out to vote in this referendum. And the votes for peace were coming from the areas directly affected by the conflict. The votes against were coming from non-affected areas.

This is a nice demonstration of the dangers of complacency.

Edited to add: My Twitter responses are filled with people arguing in Spanish. As best as I can make out, there are some people wailing about "terrorists taking over congress!" and then a bunch more people responding "read the document! it's only 200 pages! It doesn't say that, you idiot!". And a few people morosely explaining that it isn't their fault - they voted for peace!

Hmmm, voter apathy, fear mongering, voters not understanding the issues, other voters getting mad at people who don't understand the issues and "not my fault, I didn't vote for that!"..... I guess it is nice to know we're not alone?

Ouch, though. This is a brutal result. 37% turnout? Can Juan Manuel Santos just call for a redo?

Edited again: This is an actual exchange I just had on Twitter with a resident of Colombia (emphasis added by me):

Responder: "Look, this country justified paramilitary culture & the heritage of Escobar. Brexited itself! Soooo.... Hard times ahead."

Me: "Wow. Hope you find a way forward. No one wants to violence escalate."

Responder: "Hear! & I wish no Trump upon the world as US President. Heed the warning, please. Heed it."

Me: "I am definitely not voting for Trump, believe me. No one I know is. Pretty sure he will lose."

Responder: "Just.... beware. All the best, thx 4 your words"

I wish I knew more about this.  I wonder how the conflict compares to the Salvadoran Civil War.  The death count per annum in that was possibly even higher, and then the Chapultepec Peace Agreement provided for the leftist guerillas to contest elections, and the conflict was demilitarized - seemingly successfully, though the country is still riven by street violence, perhaps no longer largely of an ideological character.  The only other peace negotiation put to a referendum that immediately comes to mind was the Good Friday Agreement.  There's certainly still a non-trivial proportion of the unionist Northern Irish population who weren't prepared to countenance any settlement that provided for amnesty, but it's obvious that whatever the miscarriages of justice on whatever side, the greater good was served by it.

I was going to buy one of these for use in my restoration class/research.

Guess I'll buy one from these pinkos instead.


ETA: just mousing over the first link doesn't reveal the true insanity. At the surface, it just looks like a thing to grub out woody invasives but a visit to the website reveals the man who invented it has truly lost his mind in conspiracy theories and no longer actually sells the product. The second link is prety uninteresting, a second guy made some slight improvements to the first guy's product and sells essentially the same thing.

Care to hazard a guess as the conclusion of this aid and assistance review?  I'm going to surmise that they keep doing both.

The munitions he was referring to: the apparent remnants of an Raytheon MK-82 500 lb used to kill 140 people at a funeral in Sanaa last week, presumably dropped from a US-made F-15 or a UK-made Tornado or Eurofighter.  The Royal Saudi Air Force has purchased more than twice as many British-made Eurofighters (an instance of what Chomsky aptly describes as 'state-subsidized waste production') than has Britain. 

This spokesperson casts doubts on the sincerity of Russian calls for an investigation into the convoy bombing, while the US reportedly provided diplomatic cover to Saudi Arabia at the UN last year, obstructing attempts to investigate them. 

This is indeed very interesting and underrepored, and I think a microcosm in many ways for the status of 'free' labour under capitalist enterprises generally.  The broader situation is relatively less appalling, for the most part in the advanced industrial nations, at least, but really not less unjustifiable and irrational.  People should control the product of their labour and do so under democratic conditions.

Specifically on this issue, it's impossible not to view pictures of prisoners working on plantations today - or here in the seventies - and see the evidence of Reconstruction's failure and 'the new Jim Crow' (the title of Michelle Alexander's book).