Does this Crisis echo the Glorious Revolutuon?

[David Horn]

(01-07-2017, 01:36 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:Like defining the relationship between Congress and the President?

Like I said, that would be a big parallel if it happened.  I can even envision scenarios where a Trump administration could spur it.  I just haven't seen any evidence of it brewing.  Congress has been pretty enthusiastic about abrogating its responsibilities in the war-making department all saeculum, no sign of them stopping now.

But still, it's a possibility.  Pitching big chunks of the Constitution in order to implement a parliamentary system in its place?  I don't see it happening in the next 10 years.  Hasn't exactly been a big issue people have been squabbling about for the last several decades, which is generally what has preceded consitutional amendments.

The entire point of a crisis is to provide the impetus to trigger change.   It doesn't guarantee success, just a window with altered rules.  I'm skeptical that we have that this time.

[David Horn]

(01-07-2017, 09:40 AM)Odin Wrote: I think there are some definite parallels with the Glorious Revolution building up. According to Colin Woodard a defining aspect of the Glorious Revolution in the American colonies, especially New England, was the determination to preserve their own local cultural and political autonomy in the face of centralization efforts from London. Right now we have a "Dixie" political alliance centered on the Deep South and Greater Appalachia trying to impose their will on the other cultures that make up the US, and resistance and anger is building. Trump may be our Edmund Andross.

The only thing that makes that clumsy is the difference between impressions and reality.  The Dixie Alliance is built on the idea of self determination and freedom, but is actually highly authoritarian.   It's hard to square that circle.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Switching to a Parliamentary system won't fix that either.  The problem lies with the people, who take very little interest in their governance, except where it impacts then directly.  Thus, we have many thinking that things can be done that are unsustainable or even unachievable, while being equally sure that someone else is getting more than they are.

I'm almost 70.  When I attended public school, we had a mandatory history or civics class every year starting in the 7th grade, with only the 12th grade being an elective.  No one graduated with less than 5 years.  Now, I'm not sure what is required.  I do know that much of the history is now social history.  That's certainly valuable, but its nowhere near as fundamental as traditional programs.

Agreed.  It doesn't get much better in college, either.  I have a history degree, and social history (and anything else touching on aspects of race, gender, or class) has expanded to pretty much eat up military, diplomatic, and, to a less extent, economic history.  Which, again, is not to say that social history isn't useful, and that its lack of inclusion 50 years ago wasn't wrong, but we have long since lurched to far in the opposite direction.

I had an American Revolution class as Columbia where the professor spent more than half the class on the Spanish colonies, and went out of his way to talk about how unimportant and awful the people of New England were.

In terms of parliamentary systems, it is worthwhile to point out that Tony Blair was just as successful in dragging Britain into Iraq as Bush was America.

Quote:It does to the extent that we have a long-standing system that uses labor and ownership as the two modes of acquiring goods and services.  If you don't own, then you must work to acquire money to buy things you need or do without.  If that's disrupted entirely, what replaces it?  99% are still outside the ownership class.  Very few have he option of moving off the grid and living off the land, so maintaining peace and order mandates another model.  Now, that model can be as fair as the old Feudal system, but only if the serfs are kept ignorant.  In this technological age, that seems bizarre, so I assume it will be different, just unknown for now.

Really, this again?  I swear, you old people get an idea stuck in your head and just can't shake it. 

Quote:The entire point of a crisis is to provide the impetus to trigger change.   It doesn't guarantee success, just a window with altered rules.  I'm skeptical that we have that this time.

A window to effect (sic) change?  I disagree, I think we have one, it just may not be the change you or even I want.

Quote:I think there are some definite parallels with the Glorious Revolution building up. According to Colin Woodard a defining aspect of the Glorious Revolution in the American colonies, especially New England, was the determination to preserve their own local cultural and political autonomy in the face of centralization efforts from London. Right now we have a "Dixie" political alliance centered on the Deep South and Greater Appalachia trying to impose their will on the other cultures that make up the US, and resistance and anger is building. Trump may be our Edmund Andross.

That's a tenuous reading of the present situation if I have ever heard one.  I would imagine (actually, I have explicitly heard) that those evil southerners feel the exact way about what the left was doing the past few years.  That's the nature of a values-mismatch, things that seem perfectly reasonable and uncontroversial to one feel like an unwarranted and aggressive intrusion on local norms to another, and vice versa.  Besides, Trump's winning margin came from the Upper Midwest.  Who knows, the next election might seem Minnesota fall into that column as well.

[Warren Dew]

(01-06-2017, 10:59 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: The reassertion of war-making and other sorts of authority by Congress over the White House WOULD be an interesting parallel with the Glorious Revolution, and one can fairly easily imagine situations where that came about.  However, it doesn't seem to be in the cards at the moment, and so we should probably wait and see how things turn out before making that explicit comparison, at least as far as this board is concerned.

I think it's already happening.  Previously transition teams have outlined legislation, and the President's agenda drove the big initiatives when there was a change of administration.  This time, it seems to be the House which is preparing the legislation.

Whether the way in which that is happening actually parallels the Glorious Revolution is another question.

War making authority hasn't been a point of contention because Congress has by and large supported Presidential levels of spending.  Of course, at 20% of the budget, military ventures are not what's breaking the bank these days.  Speaker Ryan wants to address the real big ticket issues like Medicare, and Social Security, and Trump doesn't; maybe we should watch how that one turns out.

[pbrower2a]

The big benefit of the parliamentary system is the vote of no confidence, whose closest analogue in our system is impeachment. There is no way to remove a President who is simply incompetent.

[Odin]

(01-07-2017, 10:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-07-2017, 09:40 AM)Odin Wrote: I think there are some definite parallels with the Glorious Revolution building up. According to Colin Woodard a defining aspect of the Glorious Revolution in the American colonies, especially New England, was the determination to preserve their own local cultural and political autonomy in the face of centralization efforts from London. Right now we have a "Dixie" political alliance centered on the Deep South and Greater Appalachia trying to impose their will on the other cultures that make up the US, and resistance and anger is building. Trump may be our Edmund Andross.

The only thing that makes that clumsy is the difference between impressions and reality.  The Dixie Alliance is built on the idea of self determination and freedom, but is actually highly authoritarian.   It's hard to square that circle.

Yep. Greater Appalachia loves self-determination and freedom, while the Deep South is highly authoritarian and conceives of "Freedom" in the classical Greco-Roman republican sense of the autonomy of the ruling class. The two nations have been tied together by a shared "private protestant" religious heritage that sees tying to better the world as immoral and is focused on "saving one's soul", by a common belief in white supremacy, and a common dislike of Yankees. The oligarchs of the Deep South are always scared of the populist strain of Greater Appalachia, the kind that produced people like LBJ and used to be common in the Democratic Party, breaking out. I suspect it is a big reason the Right hates Bill Clinton so virulently, he is a charismatic good-ol-boy Greater-Appalachian and so reminds them of the populists they fear.

[Odin]

(01-07-2017, 03:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Agreed.  It doesn't get much better in college, either.  I have a history degree, and social history (and anything else touching on aspects of race, gender, or class) has expanded to pretty much eat up military, diplomatic, and, to a less extent, economic history.  Which, again, is not to say that social history isn't useful, and that its lack of inclusion 50 years ago wasn't wrong, but we have long since lurched to far in the opposite direction.

Also, a lot of professional historians have become a very parochial bunch and poo-poo any grand historical theories. Just even mentioning the idea that there can be great patterns and cycles in history can get you laughed at.

(01-07-2017, 03:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I had an American Revolution class as Columbia where the professor spent more than half the class on the Spanish colonies, and went out of his way to talk about how unimportant and awful the people of New England were.

This makes me angry.  

(01-07-2017, 03:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: That's a tenuous reading of the present situation if I have ever heard one.  I would imagine (actually, I have explicitly heard) that those evil southerners feel the exact way about what the left was doing the past few years.  That's the nature of a values-mismatch, things that seem perfectly reasonable and uncontroversial to one feel like an unwarranted and aggressive intrusion on local norms to another, and vice versa.  Besides, Trump's winning margin came from the Upper Midwest.  Who knows, the next election might seem Minnesota fall into that column as well.

I think people are getting the wrong idea about what happened in the Midwest because they have this idea that blue collar whites used to be strongly Dem right up until Trump and then flipped. The Dems had a terrible candidate and many working class liberal voters up here stayed home rather than vote for her, thinking that she was going to win anyway because of the national polls. The working class white people Trump did well with are the sort of people who have been already voting Republican since Reagan.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Also, a lot of professional historians have become a very parochial bunch and poo-poo any grand historical theories. Just even mentioning the idea that there can be great patterns and cycles in history can get you laughed a

Yeah, grand theories haven't been fashionable among professional historians in a very long time (interwar, really).  Most of the work done on it since has been among sociologists (Modelski, Chase-Dunn, etc.), ecologists (Turchin), and obscure economic sects.  Academic focuses are very much a matter of fashion and internal politics.  One of the many reasons why I lost any desire to become and academic.

Quote:This makes me angry.  

Yeah, it's not that I didn't have positive experiences with professors at Columbia and other institutions where I took classes, but all in all I was very unimpressed.  That class in particular was very bad.

Quote:I think people are getting the wrong idea about what happened in the Midwest because they have this idea that blue collar whites used to be strongly Dem right up until Trump and then flipped. The Dems had a terrible candidate and many working class liberal voters up here stayed home rather than vote for her, thinking that she was going to win anyway because of the national polls. The working class white people Trump did well with are the sort of people who have been already voting Republican since Reagan.

That's not where I was going with that at all, and I agree with you.  The Upper Midwest has been trending Republican at the state and local level since Reagan (and deindustrialization, really) in much the same way that the South had after the Civil Rights movement.  A shift in their presidential votes to reflect this was probably inevitable.  My point was that given the extent to which issues of race and class are also salient in voting patterns, a strict Colin Woodard reading of sectional conflict doesn't really tell the full story.

[Odin]

(01-08-2017, 02:04 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: That's not where I was going with that at all, and I agree with you.  The Upper Midwest has been trending Republican at the state and local level since Reagan (and deindustrialization, really) in much the same way that the South had after the Civil Rights movement.  A shift in their presidential votes to reflect this was probably inevitable.  My point was that given the extent to which issues of race and class are also salient in voting patterns, a strict Colin Woodard reading of sectional conflict doesn't really tell the full story.

I suspect a big thing in the Rust belt is that according to Woodard we Yankees tend to be suspicious of too much cultural diversity and prefer aggressive assimilation. In the last few decades there has been a shift away from thinking in terms of a "melting pot" and more towards a "tossed salad" attitude, which tends to offend Yankee assimilationist sensibilities.

[SomeGuy]

(01-09-2017, 08:39 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-08-2017, 02:04 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: That's not where I was going with that at all, and I agree with you.  The Upper Midwest has been trending Republican at the state and local level since Reagan (and deindustrialization, really) in much the same way that the South had after the Civil Rights movement.  A shift in their presidential votes to reflect this was probably inevitable.  My point was that given the extent to which issues of race and class are also salient in voting patterns, a strict Colin Woodard reading of sectional conflict doesn't really tell the full story.

I suspect a big thing in the Rust belt is that according to Woodard we Yankees tend to be suspicious of too much cultural diversity and prefer aggressive assimilation. In the last few decades there has been a shift away from thinking in terms of a "melting pot" and more towards a "tossed salad" attitude, which tends to offend Yankee assimilationist sensibilities.

This is likely true, but the shift was not as dramatic in the NE and I think that you need to expand your analysis beyond Woodard.

[Marypoza]

(01-08-2017, 11:26 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-07-2017, 03:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Agreed.  It doesn't get much better in college, either.  I have a history degree, and social history (and anything else touching on aspects of race, gender, or class) has expanded to pretty much eat up military, diplomatic, and, to a less extent, economic history.  Which, again, is not to say that social history isn't useful, and that its lack of inclusion 50 years ago wasn't wrong, but we have long since lurched to far in the opposite direction.

Also, a lot of professional historians have become a very parochial bunch and poo-poo any grand historical theories. Just even mentioning the idea that there can be great patterns and cycles in history can get you laughed at.

(01-07-2017, 03:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I had an American Revolution class as Columbia where the professor spent more than half the class on the Spanish colonies, and went out of his way to talk about how unimportant and awful the people of New England were.

This makes me angry.  

(01-07-2017, 03:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: That's a tenuous reading of the present situation if I have ever heard one.  I would imagine (actually, I have explicitly heard) that those evil southerners feel the exact way about what the left was doing the past few years.  That's the nature of a values-mismatch, things that seem perfectly reasonable and uncontroversial to one feel like an unwarranted and aggressive intrusion on local norms to another, and vice versa.  Besides, Trump's winning margin came from the Upper Midwest.  Who knows, the next election might seem Minnesota fall into that column as well.

I think people are getting the wrong idea about what happened in the Midwest because they have this idea that blue collar whites used to be strongly Dem right up until Trump and then flipped. The Dems had a terrible candidate and many working class liberal voters up here stayed home rather than vote for her, thinking that she was going to win anyway because of the national polls. The working class white people Trump did well with are the sort of people who have been already voting Republican since Reagan.

-- both parties ran bad candidates, 1/2 the electorate didn't even bother to vote. l'm guessing it't bcuz they didn't like either candidate to the point they didn't really care who won, not bcuz they thought the hildabitch was gonna win. The media's nonstop pimping of her may have cause ppl to get out & vote for the Donald however.

I voted 4 Jill, btw

[Odin]

(01-09-2017, 09:04 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-09-2017, 08:39 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-08-2017, 02:04 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: That's not where I was going with that at all, and I agree with you.  The Upper Midwest has been trending Republican at the state and local level since Reagan (and deindustrialization, really) in much the same way that the South had after the Civil Rights movement.  A shift in their presidential votes to reflect this was probably inevitable.  My point was that given the extent to which issues of race and class are also salient in voting patterns, a strict Colin Woodard reading of sectional conflict doesn't really tell the full story.

I suspect a big thing in the Rust belt is that according to Woodard we Yankees tend to be suspicious of too much cultural diversity and prefer aggressive assimilation. In the last few decades there has been a shift away from thinking in terms of a "melting pot" and more towards a "tossed salad" attitude, which tends to offend Yankee assimilationist sensibilities.

This is likely true, but the shift was not as dramatic in the NE and I think that you need to expand your analysis beyond Woodard.

The reason I like to bring up Woodard is that this election has caused a lot of people to start making broad over-generalizations about "rural vs. urban" that have begun to really get on my nerves. There are a lot of really ignorant people spouting nonsense since the election who think small town Wisconsin is little different from small town Alabama.

[Odin]

(01-11-2017, 05:26 AM)Marypoza Wrote: -- both parties ran bad candidates, 1/2 the electorate didn't even bother to vote. l'm guessing it't bcuz they didn't like either candidate to the point they didn't really care who won, not bcuz they thought the hildabitch was gonna win. The media's nonstop pimping of her may have cause ppl to get out & vote for the Donald however.

I voted 4 Jill, btw

You voting for Dr. Crystal-Healing makes you part of the fucking problem. The Republicans will get out and vote no matter who their candidate is, our side has people like you has people who throw a fit when the candidate isn't perfect.

[Marypoza]

(01-11-2017, 07:54 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-11-2017, 05:26 AM)Marypoza Wrote: -- both parties ran bad candidates, 1/2 the electorate didn't even bother to vote. l'm guessing it't bcuz they didn't like either candidate to the point they didn't really care who won, not bcuz they thought the hildabitch was gonna win. The media's nonstop pimping of her may have cause ppl to get out & vote for the Donald however.

I voted 4 Jill, btw

You voting for Dr. Crystal-Healing makes you part of the fucking problem. The Republicans will get out and vote no matter who their candidate is, our side has people like you has people who throw a fit when the candidate isn't perfect.

-- l didn't throw a fit. l voted for the candidate who best represented me. How is that part of the problem? (you know where you can shove your fbombs, btw) lf Jill hadn't been running l'd of been in the 1/2 of the electorate that stayed home.

[Odin]

(01-11-2017, 09:26 AM)Marypoza Wrote:

(01-11-2017, 07:54 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-11-2017, 05:26 AM)Marypoza Wrote: -- both parties ran bad candidates, 1/2 the electorate didn't even bother to vote. l'm guessing it't bcuz they didn't like either candidate to the point they didn't really care who won, not bcuz they thought the hildabitch was gonna win. The media's nonstop pimping of her may have cause ppl to get out & vote for the Donald however.

I voted 4 Jill, btw

You voting for Dr. Crystal-Healing makes you part of the fucking problem. The Republicans will get out and vote no matter who their candidate is, our side has people like you has people who throw a fit when the candidate isn't perfect.

-- l didn't throw a fit. l voted for the candidate who best represented me. How is that part of the problem?  (you know where you can shove your fbombs, btw) lf Jill hadn't been running l'd of been in the 1/2 of the electorate that stayed home.

Voting is a civic duty, not a lifestyle choice for your own vanity. Voting for a candidate who cannot win and just acts as a spoiler for the Dems is essentially voting for Trump.

And you do know that there are more things to vote on than just the presidential election, right?

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Voting is a civic duty, not a lifestyle choice for your own vanity. Voting for a candidate who cannot win and just acts as a spoiler for the Dems is essentially voting for Trump.

Indeed, it is a solemn undertaking, only to be engaged in after careful thought and consideration, weighing the relative merits of each candidate and issue and choosing accordingly.  It's why I voted for Trump. 

[David Horn]

(01-08-2017, 11:18 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-07-2017, 10:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-07-2017, 09:40 AM)Odin Wrote: I think there are some definite parallels with the Glorious Revolution building up. According to Colin Woodard a defining aspect of the Glorious Revolution in the American colonies, especially New England, was the determination to preserve their own local cultural and political autonomy in the face of centralization efforts from London. Right now we have a "Dixie" political alliance centered on the Deep South and Greater Appalachia trying to impose their will on the other cultures that make up the US, and resistance and anger is building. Trump may be our Edmund Andross.

The only thing that makes that clumsy is the difference between impressions and reality.  The Dixie Alliance is built on the idea of self determination and freedom, but is actually highly authoritarian.   It's hard to square that circle.

Yep. Greater Appalachia loves self-determination and freedom, while the Deep South is highly authoritarian and conceives of "Freedom" in the classical Greco-Roman republican sense of the autonomy of the ruling class. The two nations have been tied together by a shared "private protestant" religious heritage that sees tying to better the world as immoral and is focused on "saving one's soul", by a common belief in white supremacy, and a common dislike of Yankees. The oligarchs of the Deep South are always scared of the populist strain of Greater Appalachia, the kind that produced people like LBJ and used to be common in the Democratic Party, breaking out. I suspect it is a big reason the Right hates Bill Clinton so virulently, he is a charismatic good-ol-boy  Greater-Appalachian and so reminds them of the populists they fear.

I lived among the cavaliers in the Virginia Tidewater, and among the Scots-Irish in Appalachia.  The difference are more style than substance.  The old aristocracy is hidebound and closed to the outside (I'll never be a Virginian in their eyes), but the Appalachians aren't any more inviting that the cavaliers.  Both groups reject the imposition of authority fro outside, and both seek to set boundaries others must obey.

[SomeGuy]

Are there actual "cavaliers" these days?  In Virginia?

[David Horn]

(01-08-2017, 02:04 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yeah, it's not that I didn't have positive experiences with professors at Columbia and other institutions where I took classes, but all in all I was very unimpressed.  That class in particular was very bad.

I had my one bad experience taking an upper level elective in Constitutional History.  This was 1991, so not yesterday but not ancient times either. 
This was a class full of pre-law types, and I was the only one with a major outside the general field.  Long story short, the professor made the class all about "the struggle", with everything so PC it was suffocating.  Since he enjoyed calling on me thinking I would be good discussion fodder, I took him on about the entire PC thing.  Most of the class cringed, but I only needed to pass the class not excel.  After 20 minutes of verbal swordplay, the class ended and we all departed.  To his credit, he didn't hold it against me.

[David Horn]

(01-11-2017, 07:51 AM)Odin Wrote: The reason I like to bring up Woodard is that this election has caused a lot of people to start making broad over-generalizations about "rural vs. urban" that have begun to really get on my nerves. There are a lot of really ignorant people spouting nonsense since the election who think small town Wisconsin is little different from small town Alabama.

Have you spent any time in small town Alabama?  It's different, but not to the extent you may think.  Both cultures support insular thinking, because it's a feasible way to live.  In a city, you are thrown into the tossed salad, like it or not.