Social Democracy. I

Parade of SPD activists in Berlin on election day, January 19 1919. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-033-15 / Gebrüder Haeckel / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Labor historian Eric Blanc, member of the Bread and Roses caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, was on the radio trying to explain the DSA to the wider public, which I thought he was doing very well, but there was a point where I wanted to quibble (naturally, no socialist can ever bear to agree with another socialist about everything), which was when he described his ideological position in the DSA as on the organization's "right" (while acknowledging that it wasn't at all "right" in the general scheme of things), and I just think that doesn't mean what it's intended to mean—implying some kind of sympathy with a majority "center" imagined as too judicious to take sides, perfectly balanced between left and right views, an Aristotelian mean, as opposed to what it actually is, the gap at the middle of a bimodal distribution composed of the people who aren't able to ferret out enough information to make up their minds with any stability (maybe better illustrated as much wider and with narrower humps).

Via Wikipedia.

A more useful dichotomy would be the famous one proposed by young Karl Marx in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." 

Marx regarded "left" and "right" as categories of bourgeois government, not something he, as an anti-bourgeois revolutionary, would want to apply to himself, but he did see this other distinction, between theory and praxis if you like, eventually serving on both sides himself, theorizing it in the reading room of the British Museum elaborating the edifice of Scientific Socialism at the same time as he was practicing it in his political participation in the 1848 German revolution (when he first joined a movement calling itself "Communist") and later the International Workingmen's Association, envisaged as the source of workers' parties seeking parliamentary power in Britain and on the Continent, and forming temporary alliances with the liberal bourgeois parties of the European left in efforts to improve the lot of the wage slaves of the Industrial Revolution, or the American Radical Republicans in their fight to abolish Black chattel slavery (as European correspondent of Horace Greeley's New York Herald).

Marx was both philosopher and activist, and it would be difficult to say in which capacity he would count as more "left" in today's sense, particularly hard-ass as a theorist and particularly lively as a practitioner; but I want to stress that praxis is pragmatic, and as much as "pragmatism" may often seem like faint-hearted hesitancy, it's really a matter of political judgment of what constitutes doing, as the Methodists say, "all the good you can".

For the record: The Secret History of Diversity in US Higher Education

 

He doesn't look like an African explorer called Dr. Spaulding. He looks like a Commie from the Lower East Side. Duck Soup, 1933.

There's a story about the evolution of US higher education that involves "meritocracy" at a time the word would never have been used other than in its original satirical sense: The development of rigorous competitive academic standards for admission after World War II was part of an effort...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 8:56 AM

specifically to overcome anti-Jewish quotas at elite schools that excluded the "wrong kind" of Jews, from immigrant families and public high schools and not wealthy or athletic--and the point was *in favor* of diversifying the comfortable mediocrity of the WASP ruling class...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:01 AM

in the atmosphere of competition among schools to become "centers of excellence" in the era between the Manhattan Project and the Sputnik. But other kinds of excellence than very high SAT scores and other kinds of diversity didn't get the same kind of attention (sports helped overcome...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:09 AM

resistance against recruiting Black students but not in such big numbers--you don't need as many football and basketball and track stars as you do science students). But the effort to increase diversity was always understood as an effort to increase excellence of schools as a whole...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM

until the rightwing revolt we know from cases like Bakke turned the idea upside down with ideas of "reverse discrimination", meant to restore the mediocre WASP ascendancy. You can read some of this between the lines here www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:16 AM

And of course the push to recruit Jewish science students and Black athletes also recruited a lot of Jewish and Black humanities and social science students and radical activists, and the ruling class didn't like that one little bit.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:23 AM

They combated it with a strategy of divide and conquer, welcoming (or feigning to welcome) Jewish students, as they now welcome Asian Americans, as "meritorious" allies.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:28 AM

And that's where we are.

Whig History

 

The Tories and the Whigs, Pulling for a Crown. Via History Collection.

Again:

It's religion that allows the excesses of authority, in exactly the way I describe, in that discussion and others: power is constrained by limits of force and, later — post 1215, as we're taught in school — by law (a concept that reaches its revolutionary fruition in the 18th Century, in America and France). For millennia the king had unlimited power, as an expression of ownership, he owned the country and sublet it to his Lords, who were called into service to defend it against other fiefdoms or countries. The point is that the whole thing was property + force = authority — two utterly concrete (meaning, not abstract) elements — until law was placed atop the hierarchy...

religion lets a particular group 1) control the framework of morality absolutely, undergirding states, treaties, laws, everything else...2) within that authoritarian mandate, lets a small group absolutely control the parameters...and 3) is designed to work in terms of the antiquated, the outmoded, and the medieval (so that the elements of civilization are, as they say, "deprecated"). It's the perfect formula for tyrannical control.

If I'm correct in my utopian predictions, the 21st Century will be remembered as the moment when humanity finally outgrew and cast off that ancient shackle. We can't pretend the question isn't being forced — we could hold onto all of it the way we retain so many outmoded rituals (like the father "giving away" the bride in marriage), but they're forcing us to call the question and dump it all.

Jordan's picture, which I may well have been reading wrong, and if so forgive me, looked to me like what they call "whig history", the picture of history developed in Britain after the end of the Napoleonic wars, as the Whig party was turning into the Liberals, characterizing the whole of history as

Opinions: Postscript

Ruta graveolens, rue, meaning "repentenance", though as Ophelia says "we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays." Photo via BardGarden.

I found a terrific piece of actual scholarship, as opposed to bloggy poking around in the evidence, in support of my guesses on the legal status of abortion in early modern England, in Carla Spivack, "To 'Bring Down the Flowers': The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England", in William and Mary Journal of Women and Law XIV/1 (2007), which took on the 2006 book by Joseph Dellapenna that may well have been Alito's basic source, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, and its assertion that

contrary to Justice Blackmun's historic analysis in Roe, "abortion was considered a serious crime throughout most of European history" and that "courts did... punish abortions before quickening during the Middle Ages."

On the contrary, Spivack shows,

Opinions We Never Finished Reading. IV

Meanwhile, beyond the grim world of the witch killers Coke and Hale, there's evidence of more relaxed attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, in some places that you might not expect at all. 

For instance, in 1729, around the same time as the prosecution of Eleanor Beare, a brand new newspaper, the Philadelphia Gazette, published by Samuel Keimer, was running a series of articles, presumably pirated, from a new English reference work, Chambers' Cyclopaedia, in alphabetical order, and apparently not paying enough attention to what he was issuing. It included a lengthy discussion of Abortion in the fifth number, which had been okay in a bound volume in England, but too explicit for the comfort of an American newspaper audience, reading a little like a how-to manual:

Anyway, none other than that first fearless American comedian-blogger, Benjamin Franklin, had a number of grudges against Keimer, who had given him his first job when he came to Philadelphia as a 17-year-old in 1723, and undercut his own plan to start a newspaper by founding the Gazette at the end of 1728. Franklin and some friends really intended to drive Keimer out of business, in a series of  satirical opinion columns published under the nym "The Busy-Body", in Andrew Bradford's American Weekly Mercury. He began, however, by mocking Keimer over the abortion article, in the following bogus letters to the editor of the Mercury:

If You Want to Sit on a Hedgehog You Should Keep Your Pants on. And Other Lessons of Ukrainian History

 

Ilya Repin, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, 1880-91, from the Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), via Wikipedia.

Yglesias yesterday, talking about the irony of American Jews whose ancestors emigrated from Ukraine, fleeing the draft (if they picked you, you served 25 years) and the pogroms by murderous Cossacks, now identifying as Ukrainians themselves:

The Yastreblyanskys are from Bessarabia, but I've been thinking about that too--it's strange to be sentimental about people who are fundamentally Cossacks. But then there's plenty of anti-Semitism on the other side of the Pale in Russia (the Pale existed as a dumping ground... https://t.co/zYpiw4XPpp

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2022

Note on Whataboutism

Protesters in Venceslas Square, Prague. Photo by AFP-Yonhap via The Korea Times. It's getting very international.

 

Wild day yesterday, starting with the radio news that President Zelenskyy had rejected a Russian request to start peace negotiations in Belarus (Belarus, he said, was contributing to the Russian invasion and wasn't a neutral country) and going on to the news that he'd changed his mind after a call from President Lukashenka assuring him that Belarus would not be sending any missiles, planes, or helicopters across the border as long as the talks went on: 

“I will say frankly that I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting, but let them try to make sure that no citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as a president, did not try to stop the war,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, Russia's diplomatic isolation continued to grow: Germany announced that it would reverse decades-old policy and start contributing lethal assistance to Ukraine—antitank missiles and Stingers—and the chorus of countries ready to cut Russia out of the Swift bank transfer system grew to include Japan and Hungary. Europe and Canada joined to ban Russian planes from their airspace. As I noted yesterday, important classical music figures like Putin's pal Valery Gergiev are unable to perform outside Russia; the national Polish and Swedish soccer teams are likewise refusing to play against Russia in the World Cup heats. Ukraine filed criminal charges against Russia in the International Criminal Court, and demanded Russia's expulsion from the United Nations Security Council (no, that's not going to happen). Switzerland—Switzerland!—has tossed its I-don't-know-how-many-centuries tradition of unbreakable neutrality and joined the EU in imposing financial sanctions on Russia, and may even be sending weapons. Oil monster BP is outright dumping a $25-billion stake in Rosneft:

For the Record: What Is Capitalism

Class Strugle--The board game. Via Wikipedia.

Covering some ground I'm afraid we may have covered before—

employees while the CEO keeps getting richer and takes rides into outer space in a flying penis rocket. But it also applies to Linda making a decent living by selling homemade cupcakes at the flea market. If she's selling something she produced and pricing it at...

— Ghost of Gene Rayburn of House Moderna🍸 (@ghostofgener) February 8, 2022

That is literally not capitalism. Linda is not an alienated wage slave selling her labor for the benefit of an owner sucking the surplus value out of it. She's an independent artisan who controls her own means of production, in a pattern from long before capitalism was invented.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

Stupid analogies department

 

Sorry, this is kind of childish.

What on earth is going on at The Times? Their attitude toward the Biden presidency is getting downright venomous, as in this latest "Political Memo" by the Times's Nate Silver ersatz, Nate Cohn:

Biden as a New F.D.R.? Try L.B.J.

The president’s agenda — big progressive change — has placed Democratic priorities over the voters’ desire for practical help on the pandemic and inflation.

Venomous and dumb! It's peculiar enough to start with this dichotomy between Johnson as (bad) "progressive" grinding his ideological axe in the people's faces vs. Roosevelt as (good) "centrist" just doing the practical stuff people wanted, as if Roosevelt had done all his planning on the basis of those stupid "most important issue" polls instead of gathering his Brain Trust during the campaign from the most systematically leftist thinking going on at the time outside the actual socialist parties, to design a huge and transformative program of social insurance, regulation of banking and securities industries, and strictly socialist public works programs, based on stringent structural analysis of the economy and ideas for remodeling it through central government planning. Has Cohn ever read a book about the New Deal?

For the Record: McWhorter

Divinity, via Cold Belly.

Apparently John McWhorter doesn't think being eminent in the field of linguistics qualifies anybody to talk about history or politics.

Took an undergrad course from him 20 yrs ago and he talked a LOT about Chomsky and how being a great linguist doesn’t make one an authority in any other field

— Gogi (@darealgogi) November 28, 2021

But it's OK if you're a Republican. That's where people really value amateurism.

Public Health is Public

North Western Fever and Smallpox Hopsital, Hampstead, 1871, via UK National Archives. 

 Piece at The Atlantic by the extraordinary Ed Yong putting the concept of "public health" in its US historical context in the Progressive era, with the realization that poverty, inequity, and exploitation were literally making people sick:

A mixed group of physicians, scientists, industrialists, and social activists all saw themselves “as part of this giant social-reform effort that was going to transform the health of the nation,” David Rosner, a public-health historian at Columbia University, told me. They were united by a simple yet radical notion: that some people were more susceptible to disease because of social problems. And they worked to address those foundational ills—dilapidated neighborhoods, crowded housing, unsafe working conditions, poor sanitation—with a “moral certainty regarding the need to act,” Rosner and his colleagues wrote in a 2010 paper.

Providing the slumdwellers with fresh air, clean water, and light protects everybody from tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid, even us upstanding citizens on the right side of the railroad tracks. 

This is such a nice communitarian picture, of something that really existed in our country at one time, through it existed, of course, at the same time as the rapacity and cruelty of the Gilded Age, and the real power was generally wielded by the robber barons who were responsible for the poverty and inequity and exploitation—government being largely their obedient servant, the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" as Marx called it. 

New Bottle For Old Whine

 

Graphic by The Heckler, June 2011, in honor of legendary Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, quoted as saying, "Surprisingly, my tears are slightly peachy with a touch of licorice."

People somewhat exercised by this big article in The Atlantic by a psychiatrist, Sally Satel, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left":

In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychologicalmakeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster.” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion....

Actually Adorno was not a psychologist but offered a sociological perspective to the team, and made a relatively small contribution (to five of the 23 chapters). And I don't think it's correct to say they "concluded" that authoritarianism was found only among conservatives; rather, rightwing authoritarianism was what the mostly American psychologists ( Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford) set out to study, carefully weeding out the contrast with revolutionary leftism that was a key to the original Frankfurt School project:

Bipartisanship?

James Gillray, 1791, "The Hopes of the Party Before July 14", showing the Whig leader Charles James Fox as ready to chop off the head of George III, while Queen Charlotte and the Tory leader William Pitt the Younger, upper right, have already been executed. That's what I call partisanship! British Museum, via Nynorsk Wikiwand (they had the best resolution). 

Nice piece wondering about the way we fetishize "bipartisanship", by the historian Nicole Hemmer at CNN's website, localizes the moment we're nostalgic for, when bipartisanship was apparently good in its own right:

For much of US history, bipartisanship was not lionized. It was only in the mid-20th century that bipartisan compromise began to confer a golden sheen on legislation. That's in part because it was more attainable, and because at times, the results were profoundly beneficial. The two major parties had become a mishmash of ideologies: there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and on the major issues of the day, bipartisanship made life-changing legislation possible. The Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid — all bipartisan.

In the 1940s and 1950s, with the threat of totalitarianism looming large in the American imagination, there was something particularly beneficial to politicians about championing bipartisanship. It showed voters (along with foreign leaders and allies abroad) that American lawmakers followed a standard higher than simple party interests. Compromise elevated them to the ranks of technocratic statesmen (they were nearly all men) who were unencumbered by devotion to party, who were instead dedicated to higher ideals and first principles.

I think that may be understating how weird that time was historically, and not quite healthy, and how much the very tenuousness of some of those accomplishments is related to the peculiarity of the situation.

Annals of Derp: Brooks Stabs at an Answer, Answer Fights Back

 Independence Day 2017, reposted

The new Brooks backyard.

Happy Independence Day! Here's former New York Times columnist David Brooks to celebrate by swallowing 50 hot dogs' worth of American history in ten minutes, without once mentioning any of the things we traditionally think about on the Fourth of July, like self-evident truths, or letting facts be submitted to a candid world, or fireworks.  Instead he wants to know, "What's the Matter with Republicans?", in the context of the fact that as Trump and the Republican Party work to take away benefits from the American working class, Trump's base of 40% or so remains faithful to him and Republican candidates win special elections in Kansas, Montana, Georgia, and South Carolina:

What’s going on? Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?

Let's see, how can we think about this question without addressing any of the discussion that has taken place since Thomas Frank asked it 13 years ago? I know! Put it down to the good old frontier ethos!

It's the Debt, Stupid. I Mean the GOOD Debt.

Sichuan man with 13,500 copper cash, same as the Qin dynasty more than 2,000 years earlier, 1917, photo by Sydney D. Gamble via Wikipedia.

My mind is still stuck on money here, and all the wonderful things I've learned about it in the last couple of weeks, of which a lot is scattered around the comments and not necessarily quite coherent, starting with the point about where money comes from. Willie Sutton was right! It comes from the bank! 

Seriously—this was not always the case, and it was never the case as much as it is now, but banks make money, by which I don't mean physical currency, the bills and coins in your wallet that represent your money, which are of course manufactured by the Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and given to the bank to distribute to the public as a convenient way for us to move our money around, as in buying things, turning them over to the shopkeeper as a token of our exchange that she can send back to the bank to inform them that the money is now hers and have them adjust her account accordingly. 

That money, actual money, is not a thing at all, but a relationship, or potential relationship, between a person who has something and a person who wants something, the relationship of indebtedness: when I give the person my dollar bill, she is obligated to give me a cup of coffee, she owes it to me—or if I don't, and take the coffee anyway, I am obligated to her, and must bring her the dollar bill later on (these tiny credit operations hardly happen anywhere any more, I think, but they used to be a normal part of life, where they'd keep you a tab at the grocer and the barber and the bar and so forth).

It's Complicated

Liberty Tree, corner of Essex and Washington Streets, Boston, undated, via history.com.

I've been wanting to go back to the piece on historiography last week, and to correct something misleading I said, that led Redhand to comment

At this point in my life, I really am beginning to wonder what the hell the American Revolution was about, to begin with. "No taxation without representation," or as Yas suggests, no taxation at all, at least if you're part of the American meritocracy (or is it, actually, aristocracy?) Or, more darkly, (pun intended) was the revolution intended to enshrine under the banner of "freedom" the privileges of those "urban and urbane" white elites who were happy to see "the embattled farmers" do the real fighting at Lexington and Concord?

I didn't mean to try to substitute one categorical statement (the liberal postwar consensus view of the Revolution as a movement of pure idealistic principle) with another one (a strawman picture of the revolutionaries as purely selfish and self-interested actors). What I really wanted to praise in the older, cynical history of the early 20th century and by implication in the critical history of now is the possibility of not insisting on categorical judgments at all, of not requiring a decision on who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, of recognizing that it's complicated.

Lectiones: American Historiography

 

Stamp Act riots, Boston, 1765. Can't find a decent credit, but I think it's from Britain.

Reading a truly remarkable essay in The New Republic by William Hogeland, "Against the Consensus Approach to History" taking on the lofty historians after World War II who developed the myth of the revolutionary founding of the United States as a unified product of the Enlightenment and the belief in innate rights; in particular Edmund Morgan:

Throwing out elder historians’ prevailing focus on the founding generation’s self-interest (Clarence Alvord had said that George Washington became a patriot to defend speculations in Indian land) and on its class conflicts (Carl Becker had said that the Revolution was not only over British rule but also over the rule of elite Americans), Morgan sought to identify the grand principles that the revolutionary generation agreed on. “What the colonists had to say about Parliamentary power and about their own rights deserved to be taken seriously,” he explained later.

As the U.S. began to exercise new power around the world, Morgan set out to show that the protests in the 1760s and ’70s against the Stamp Act and other British policies offered slam-dunk evidence of a founding American consensus on principles of rights. Inherent to the American character, that consensus unified the colonists, he said, inspired the Revolution, and brought about the United States. In the larger context of his work, and the work of similarly minded colleagues, the lesson was that the founding American commitment to rights persisted in postwar U.S. commitments to modern liberal democracy.

I.e., something that sounds as if it had been designed by the CIA, in contrast to the more cynical and materialistic views, whether leftist or conservative, of the period from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (and views, I would add, that also recognize the diversity of the North American colonials, not quite the way we'd want to do it today with a focus on oppression and intersectional identity, but more compatible with that than the postwar picture).

For the Record: The Arc of Impeachment is Long

Edmund Burke in the House of Commons. Photo12/Universal Images Group, via New York Times (and a Bret Stephens column of last August, "Why Edmund Burke Still Matters").

Why, yes. Yes, you are totally wrong.

Hastings had returned home from India in 1785, but the famous conservative thinker and MP Edmund Burke had been determined since 1786 that he should be brought to justice. pic.twitter.com/ZEyOIzOUIQ

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 18, 2021

David Brooks Urges Us to Tighten Up

Ah, what's up, Brooksie ("The First Invasion of America")?

I was an American history major in college, back in the 1980s.

I’ll be honest with you. I thrilled to the way the American story was told back then. To immigrate to America was to join the luckiest and greatest nation in history. “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American knew it,” Henry Steele Commager wrote in his 1950 book, “The American Mind.”

He was an undergraduate and his bibliography was already 30 years out of date.

Because the practice of American historiography utterly changed in the two decades after David Brooks's birth, as Jonathan Wiener explained at the 1983 meeting of the Organization of American Historians (published in 1989, putting both Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz, Marxish and un-Marxish, at the head of the acknowledgment footnote):

Handicap

Via League of Legends.

The family dined in Chinatown last night, standing by our conviction that we're no more likely to catch Covid-19 (or Trump Flu, as Misfit, via Ten Bears, via Bethesda71 is calling it) there than anywhere else in town (for the moment—we are not adopting President Chucklehead's position that there's nothing wrong, or that the virus is just a CNN trick to make him look bad), and I had the opportunity to miss the entire debate—didn't even look at my phone until we were on the way home, and I'm pretty happy about that. Judging from the clips it was awful, though I'm glad in principle that Elizabeth Warren said the things she said about Michael Bloomberg, whom I continue to consider to be a danger to the country, and about Bernard Sanders, in terms I'd like to have used myself:

“Bernie and I agree on a lot of things, but I think that I would make a better president than Bernie. And the reason for that is that getting a progressive agenda enacted is going to be really hard, and it's gonna take someone who digs into the details to make it happen,” Warren said. “Bernie and I both wanted to help rein in Wall Street. In 2008 we both got our chance, but I dug in, I fought the big banks, I built the coalitions and I won. Bernie and I both want to see universal health care. But Bernie's plan doesn't show how we're gonna get there, doesn't show how we're going to get enough allies into it, and doesn't show enough about how we're going to pay for it. I dug in, I did the work, and then Bernie's team trashed me for it.”

As I mentioned in my angry note of 17 February.

I have the funniest feeling at the moment of really seriously not knowing what's going on in this election at all, and of nobody really knowing. Some of the less obnoxious class of Berners on my Twitter feed were going on about what Bernie would do if Bloomberg were to win the nomination (of which fivethirtyeight estimates the chances at about 4%), betray his following by keeping his promise to support the nominee, or split off and lead the Revolution on some kind of outside, you couldn't tell whether in an independent candidacy or a mass people power movement or what, and everything about this scenario seemed so implausible to me that I stopped reading, but I didn't have a more probable one myself.