This is tough reading, but thank you for writing it. Maybe there is a humility we need to accept with regards to this period of ascending authortarianism. We don't know exactly what shape it will take, how stable it will be, what opprotunities will open up to break it down.
Honestly, the first commandment will be, if it the worst-case scenario: survive. But yes, also: it may be fragile, there may be powerful interests (even I use the word!) that set themselves against it if it is unstable and capricious, it may be like nothing familiar (for good or ill). So yes, make no plans far in advance of the reality.
I think there are democratic countries that have come closer to some form of seizure of authority by military elements than is commonly thought. And there are modern nations where a populist right has come into power and then governed more or less as a 'normal' conservative party despite sounding otherwise. I think the thing to keep in mind also is that nations are, in many respects, 'young' political forms in human history, and modernity is also both 'young' and 'novel', e.g., it has elements that are quite new to human experience. In that sense, analogies may fail us: what comes next may surprise us all, and sometimes unexpected turns are actually for the best.
Attending to the local, being in place, is a strong argument. Today, a pedestrian bridge across the Huron River was suddenly in place, dropped in place last evening. A bridge I had called for six years ago in a meeting with a developer. A big change in the neighborhood. And there is more to be done. Yet, I think we will also be called to join massive national protests and strikes. And I don’t see myself letting those larger efforts go by. It may not be an either/or situation. More importantly, I think more of us need to read and engage you Tim, more of us have to learn again to set out our thoughts in longer form than the short takes that social media privileges.
My deep thanks for this essay. It has provided much needed insight with which to create frames of acceptance for the dissolution of the mindset you so ably describe. "Frames of acceptance" is Kenneth Burke's term for "the more or less organized system of meanings" by which a thinking person “gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it.” Another of Burke's phrases, "the bureaucratization of the imagination," sprang to mind as I read your thoughts about digital politics and cultural labor.
Both phrases are from Attitudes Toward History (1937), which starts off, as I have started my own frame building, with William James and his deep commitments to pluralist conceptions of knowledge and his tendency to anarchism in politics. As I've said in these comments, perhaps too many times, the anti-fascist political and cultural work of the period when Burke coined those phrases may be instructive as we crawl from the wreckage. Like Burke, I look to James, Whitman, and Emerson for wisdom. I also look to early pragmatist writers like Jane Addams, Anna Julia Cooper, John Dewey, and W. E. B. Du Bois for a non-determinist but more or less organized system of ideas tethered to democratic ideals.
The pragmatist intellectual tradition still lives, mostly in the margins of history and political science departments, and perhaps in the aspirations of some public-minded bureaucrats and political writers. Although pragmatism was part of the origin of the "progressive" aspects of the fading mindset, those originating ideas were left behind in the urge to create national systems and social structures. I believe early pragmatist writing is well suited to help create a "mindset that puts everyone who holds it into view and into relation, where solving your own problems and making yourself well and whole are always already part of solving our problems and making ourselves well and whole."
This is tough reading, but thank you for writing it. Maybe there is a humility we need to accept with regards to this period of ascending authortarianism. We don't know exactly what shape it will take, how stable it will be, what opprotunities will open up to break it down.
Honestly, the first commandment will be, if it the worst-case scenario: survive. But yes, also: it may be fragile, there may be powerful interests (even I use the word!) that set themselves against it if it is unstable and capricious, it may be like nothing familiar (for good or ill). So yes, make no plans far in advance of the reality.
Is there any historical analogue if a country that you think went through a similair crisis and rise of authortarianism as the usa is today?
I think there are democratic countries that have come closer to some form of seizure of authority by military elements than is commonly thought. And there are modern nations where a populist right has come into power and then governed more or less as a 'normal' conservative party despite sounding otherwise. I think the thing to keep in mind also is that nations are, in many respects, 'young' political forms in human history, and modernity is also both 'young' and 'novel', e.g., it has elements that are quite new to human experience. In that sense, analogies may fail us: what comes next may surprise us all, and sometimes unexpected turns are actually for the best.
Attending to the local, being in place, is a strong argument. Today, a pedestrian bridge across the Huron River was suddenly in place, dropped in place last evening. A bridge I had called for six years ago in a meeting with a developer. A big change in the neighborhood. And there is more to be done. Yet, I think we will also be called to join massive national protests and strikes. And I don’t see myself letting those larger efforts go by. It may not be an either/or situation. More importantly, I think more of us need to read and engage you Tim, more of us have to learn again to set out our thoughts in longer form than the short takes that social media privileges.
My deep thanks for this essay. It has provided much needed insight with which to create frames of acceptance for the dissolution of the mindset you so ably describe. "Frames of acceptance" is Kenneth Burke's term for "the more or less organized system of meanings" by which a thinking person “gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it.” Another of Burke's phrases, "the bureaucratization of the imagination," sprang to mind as I read your thoughts about digital politics and cultural labor.
Both phrases are from Attitudes Toward History (1937), which starts off, as I have started my own frame building, with William James and his deep commitments to pluralist conceptions of knowledge and his tendency to anarchism in politics. As I've said in these comments, perhaps too many times, the anti-fascist political and cultural work of the period when Burke coined those phrases may be instructive as we crawl from the wreckage. Like Burke, I look to James, Whitman, and Emerson for wisdom. I also look to early pragmatist writers like Jane Addams, Anna Julia Cooper, John Dewey, and W. E. B. Du Bois for a non-determinist but more or less organized system of ideas tethered to democratic ideals.
The pragmatist intellectual tradition still lives, mostly in the margins of history and political science departments, and perhaps in the aspirations of some public-minded bureaucrats and political writers. Although pragmatism was part of the origin of the "progressive" aspects of the fading mindset, those originating ideas were left behind in the urge to create national systems and social structures. I believe early pragmatist writing is well suited to help create a "mindset that puts everyone who holds it into view and into relation, where solving your own problems and making yourself well and whole are always already part of solving our problems and making ourselves well and whole."
I think this is correct; it is what the people who got tagged as "left conservatives" like Rorty saw in pragmatism, I think.