Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In France this security is sought for in powers exercised by the heads of the administration; in America it is sought for in the principle of election.
Alexis de Tocqueville • Democracy in America, Volume I and II (Optimized for Kindle)
The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties’ positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant: that the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power. In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson ex
... See moreHeather Cox Richardson • Democracy Awakening
By 1956, the sociologist William H. Whyte saw a “decline of the Protestant ethic” and the rise of “the organization man,” for whom conformity was prized over initiative.
Micki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Habermas also adopts the Frankfurt School’s rather pessimistic analysis that monopoly capitalism and welfare-state liberalism in the United States led ultimately to a diminution of human freedom, and to the hollowing out of democratic politics, and did not provide a fruitful alternative to the fragile social order of Weimar Germany that capitulated
... See moreJames Gordon Finlayson • Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
And while those furies sometimes ebb, they also sometimes flow. In a November 1963 lecture that formed the basis of a Harper’s cover story and of a book, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter defined what he called “the paranoid style in American politics,” a recurring popular tendency to adhere to extreme conspiratorial theories about threats
... See moreJon Meacham • The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
The right had a Critical Race Theory-like talking point: the academic left is poisoning young minds; there are stable truths.
David Shields • How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon
Adams feared that the goods of fortune would determine who had power—not just in terms of the formal structures of law and government, but in terms of people’s ability to “stand out, to be recognized, and to evoke favorable public sentiments.”161 In such a society, wondered Adams, “what chance has humble, modest, obscure, and poor merit in such a s
... See moreGlory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Here we see an idea essential to the New Right: the concept that civilization is merely a thin veneer, that within man lives a savage barely disguised and liable to be exposed at any given moment. For the evangelical left, violence is a personal or social aberration that needs to be explained. For the New Right, what needs explaining is how violenc
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