When the Clock Broke
And while traditionalists, taking their cues from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Burke, believed that man was naturally sociable and tended toward consensus, so long as there was the faithful transmission of an ethical tradition, Burnham saw only conflict. This bedrock belief in the “irrational” and violent core of man and the primacy of conflict over
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the MARs, who believed in “the duty of work rather than the right of welfare; the value of loyalty to concrete persons, symbols and institutions rather than cosmopolitan dispersion of loyalties,”
John Ganz • When the Clock Broke
That attitude involved a sharp feeling of being exploited by and condescended to by the rich and having to foot the bill for minorities: “a sense of resentment and exploitation, mainly economic but also broader, that is directed upwards as well as downwards,…
John Ganz • When the Clock Broke
When democratic demand did express itself from below, it came in the form of a personalistic, charismatic, and vindictive regime: a champion of the people who could punish and humble the arrogant old ruling classes.
John Ganz • When the Clock Broke
The problem has not gone away, it’s gotten worse. We still are working to answer why the loss of faith in the old order has registered as intensified anti-egalitarianism rather than a renewed egalitarianism, why perceptions of public corruption and criminality have led to the open embrace of corruption and criminality rather than its rejection, and
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When Lasch wrote that the “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action,” he was expressing something nearly identical to the account of a “crisis of authority” or “crisis of hegemony” put forth by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: a period when “the great
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As a replacement for liberalism and its infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats, he sought inspiration in the lower-middle-class ethos of the American populist tradition, with its emphasis on the community-centered, “heroic” morality of small-scale producers—artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers. Lasch called for a renewal
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