David Seaton's picture

    Tea Party, the "dream vacuum" and the souring of America

    By David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 2:27pm |
    From 1836 to 1914, over 30 million Europeans migrated to the United States. - Wikipedia

    When I got to America on a college scholarship, I realized that the real American Dream was somewhat different from Dallas. I visited college friends in their hometowns and was struck by the spacious suburban houses and the gleaming appliances — even when their parents had simple, modest jobs. The modern American Dream, for me, was this general prosperity and well-being for the average person. European civilization had produced the great cathedrals of the world. America had the two-car garage. And this middle-class contentment created a country of optimists. Compared with the fatalism and socialist lethargy that was pervasive in India those days, Americans had a sunny attitude toward life that was utterly refreshing. Fareed Zakaria - Time
    If the box office and the mainstream media are any guide, America's contemporary psyche is oozing vampires and zombies, werewolves and predatory bankers, doomsday scenarios,  nightmares of gay and dusky Muslim freeloaders spawning goldbugs and militiamen hoarding guns and gold against the End of Days or simply hyperinflation.

    Why are Americans so obsessed with disaster if most Americans owe their being in America to one disaster or another?

    It would probably startle a lot of Americans to think that most of them have much of their origins in a massive European "ethnic cleansing".

    In the 19th century 50,000,000 Europeans migrated from Europe for diverse reasons, principally overpopulation, leading to lack of food and jobs in their native lands. Europe expelled them and as we see in the Wikipedia quote, thirty of those 50 million went to the USA.

    Today there is nowhere left for their descendants to run to.

    All of these Europeans were uprooted from their ancestral lands and their previous family and social relationships; they came from very diverse ethnic stock and religious traditions. The one thing they had in common was that America allowed them to "be fruitful and multiply". And except for a very epidermal, Hollywoody sort of pop culture, which America has diluted and homogenized and then marketed to the rest of the world, that myth of growth, the realistic possibility that anyone who works hard can live well, is still the real glue that holds Americans together as a people.

    Calvin Coolidge defined us perfectly when he said, "the chief business of the American people is business". The market place is what brings us together. We live doing business with each other and through most of our history, business has been good.

    That elementary social fabric is what globalization is putting at risk.

    A traditional nation state is where people all speak the same language, and have done so for centuries, have been intermarrying for so long that they all bear a family resemblance to each other, have a common history and usually a common religious heritage. A "people based" state like this is able to go through tremendous shocks like a carbonized Germany did at the end of World War Two or a dysfunctional Russia did when the USSR went down, total destruction of a "way of life", without any serious "identity crisis".

    The American personality has not been created from such bone and gristle, it is based on something as illusive as a "dream".

    I first became aware of this problem when I was very young. During the Korean War, many American prisoners were successfully "brainwashed" by the enemy and led to collaborate and make "treasonous" statements. There were dozens of articles about this, it was briefly a national obsession, but one article I read as a kid stuck in my mind. It was about the Turkish army, which fought alongside the USA in Korea. Although many American prisoners were "turned", by the Chinese and North Koreans not one Turkish prisoner was turned, not one.

    The disparity between Turkish and American prisoners finally came down to this: the American prisoners, felt isolated, lost and alone in the face of the enemy and were trying to make friends with the Chinese, to cut a deal, to split the difference.  The Turkish soldiers, on the other hand were Anatolian peasants, pious Muslims, for the most part: for them, the Chinese might as well have been Martians, or goats for that matter; having anything to do with them, much less betraying their group, was unthinkable for the Turks in their ethnocentric "turkishness".

    Of course, a significant part of America's wonderful flexibility is owed to our lack of such a strong identity, our ability to include and assimilate new members to our nebulous "us-ness". In a sense our lack of a pure, deeply rooted, ethnic identity is our identity. Nothing is as essentially un-American as the idea of ethnic purity.

    But this strength can become a painful weakness if America's foundational myth, the promise of a good life and upward social mobility for oneself and one's children, is shattered. That would mean a potential identity crisis, similar to what would happen in Poland or Ireland, if they stopped being Catholic, or if Israel stopped being Jewish, or if the French forgot how to cook.

    Of course, Americans do have a recognizable national character or at least a series of stereotypes that the world agrees are accurate. In the world's eyes Americans are innocent, friendly, generous, open, inventive and willing to take risks. I would maintain that those characteristics are the product of the open and generous economy and I have observed that many people who arrived in America as adults, men and women who speak heavily accented English and who only know Abraham Lincoln as the face on the five dollar bill, have quickly acquired those same characteristics... in fact they came to America hoping to acquire them.

    If Americans lose those traits then all that will be left is another stereotype that the whole world recognizes as "genuinely American": a bottomless hunger for money and a willingness, to work, to borrow beyond any possibility of ever paying back, or to even steal spectacularly in order to get their hands on it.

    And make no mistake a growthless America would finally strangle and extinguish precisely those very qualities that the world loves in Americans: generosity, openness, friendliness and the willingness to take risks and empower all those American defects that the world loathes: greed, violence and racism.

    All of the American virtues have had their origins in the seemingly infinite generosity, openness and friendliness of America's economy and our willingness to take risks was born in witnessing over and over again how taking risks paid off. All of America's defects  - greed, violence and racism - come from the fierce Darwinist battle to achieve the promised wealth and social mobility. Those are the poles of America's personality.

    There is no need to fantasize on the disaster eroticism of the Orlov or Kunstler or 2012 variety. When someone as well informed as Fareed Zakaria can write the following we know that the disaster is already here:
    Steven Rattner, who helped restructure the automobile industry, tells the story of getting a new General Motors plant online in Michigan by bringing management and unions together. "The unions agreed to allow 40% of the new plant to operate at $14-an-hour wages," he says, "which is half of GM's normal wages. The management agreed to invest in this new plant. But here's the problem: workers at GM's Mexican operations make $7 an hour, and today they are as productive as American workers. And think of this: $14 an hour translates into about $35,000 a year. That's below the median family income. The whole experience left me frightened about the fate of the American worker." (...) Capital and technology are mobile; labor isn't. American workers are located in America. (...) Technology and globalization are working together at warp speed, creating a powerful new reality. Many more goods and services can now be produced anywhere on the globe. China and India have added literally hundreds of millions of new workers to the global labor pool, producing the same goods and services as Western workers at a fraction of the price. Far from being basket-case economies and banana republics, many developing economies are now stable and well managed, and companies can do business in them with ease. At some point, all these differences add up to mean that global competition is having quite a new impact on life in the U.S. 

    That paragraph is as clear a death sentence of generosity, openness, friendliness and the willingness to take risks that I can imagine. Upward social mobility, the very heart of the "American Dream" will be frozen if America's middle class is gelded.  When that  finally happens, the bright side of the  American "soul" will have been decontented.

    America is a very complex and contradictory society and all of its infinite contradictions, tensions and endemic racism and violence have heretofore been contained by upward social mobility, high growth and finally in desperation, by low interest, house flipping credit. That all seems to have run out of road

    When people's world crumbles and tumbles round their ears, they lose most of their capacity to trust others and fall back on "does this person look like me, talk like me, think like me and pray like me?" in order to deal with chaos and discouragement. Don't take my word for it, consult any Serb, Croat, Kosovar, Ibo, Hausa, Hutu, Tutsi, Turk or Kurd, Israeli or Palestinian, Belfast Protestant or Belfast Catholic that you may have handy. They will fill you in on the details of how this all plays out. Any one of them can teach you how to say, "I want my country back" in the local lingo.

    We are already seeing this taking place. The "dream vacuum" is what the people who fund the Tea Party are exploiting to their benefit. The souring of the American character is a growth industry and the Kochs and the Murdochs, the Limbaughs and the Becks are getting in at the ground floor.

    Of course the crowning irony of it all is that American capitalism, which initially created America's phenomenal middle class prosperity, has now created the very globalization that is on a path to destroy America's society itself. Keeping this system's "freedom" to operate without interference, taxation, or regulation is the ultimate goal of those who finance the Tea Party and much of the rest of the political system.

    "Divide and rule" is the oldest method in existence for a minority to control a majority. Using this tactic Britain was able to control 300 million Indians using little more than 20,000 soldiers. The ratio of "controllers" to "controlled" in the present American scenario is infinitely more productive than British India's, as befits our MBA era of optimization.

    So finally we can see that the very same anger caused by globalization's destruction of America's social fabric is being used by those who benefit most from globalization to keep that social fabric from reacting and bringing globalization under its control.

    Cross Posted from http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

    Examples of real disaster and disaster pornograpy

     

    Real disaster: the Potato Famine Memorial in Dublin, Ireland

    Disaster as masochistic fantasy: My favorite doomster, Dimitri Orlov

     

    Comments

    An interesting post about an interesting topic, one that is not discussed enough these days: What is America?

    I agree that race identity plays a smaller (though still present) role than in Europe and that the free market is a major component. But there are others that exist in greater or lesser degrees--democracy, equality, individualism, and Monday night football, to name a few.

    On the flip side, I don't think that European national identity is nearly as clear cut as you suggest. Few nations are homogeneous enough to be free of volatile divisions. The UK has Scotland and Wales, Germany has East-West, Italy has North-South, Russia has hundreds of restive minority populations, and Spain, as I'm sure you know well, is terribly fractured by history and language. And they all have growing immigrant populations.

    Moreover, the notion that Germany and Russia weathered their respective national upheavals without severe identity crises is, if I may be blunt, silly. Indeed, the fact that the US has remained remarkably stable through wars and depressions for 150 years in stark contrast to the comparisons you offer suggests that our amorphous sense of identity is far more durable than the illusion of racially-defined nation states.


    by Michael Wolraich on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 2:56pm

    Well Orlov would say that the UK, like the USSR and the USA is merely an acronym. The English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish are separate national groups, but they get along together reasonably well... except for the Irish "troubles" of course. Spain has certain tensions between rich and poor regions, but if you had lived any time in Spain, you would know how strong the national personality is and how for centuries it has survived war, revolutions, hunger and prosperity.

    Germany despite the Cold War division is pretty homogeneous and they even recognize as Germans, ethnic Germans whose families have lived in places like Romania, Russia and even Kazakhstan sometimes for centuries, while not recognizing as "German" the children of Turkish immigrants who were born and raised in Germany... in short they have a strong ethnic identity, which has occasionally caused much unpleasantness.

    Germany and Russia weathered their respective national upheavals without severe identity crises is, if I may be blunt, silly. Indeed

    I'm not so sure of that.. as to Russia see the Orlov video and as to Germany, my wife's earliest memories are of being cold and very hungry in the ruins of Berlin, living like a gamine in Roberto Rosselini's "Germania Anno Zero", the Berliners of her generation suffered terribly as children, at one point her father was in prison camp and her mother was in the hospital with scarlet fever and she was in an orphanage with her head shaved for lice, but she was considered a lucky kid because she had shoes. There is a school photo from her childhood where half the kids are barefoot... there was a crisis in almost everything, but identity... they never had any doubts that they were Germans, in fact the idea was that they were hungry and cold, precisely because they were Germans.

     

    As to the USA, historically America's prosperity was butressed with some of the word's stiffest protectionism, I chose to write about this identity question because the globaization scenario is taking America into totally unchartered waters and the damage it is doing to America's middle class is undeniable. My idea of American identity is rather similar to Dimtri Orlov's that it is socially very thin, Americans, with few exceptions are not very deeply rooted or with great extended clans. This diversity and individualism is very attractive, but quite fragile in my view, if the basic premise of social mobility is violated.

    What I see coming is that America is well on the road to being a very mean spirited and disunited place and the Tea Party has been set into motion to speed that process along, to deepen the divisions among Americans so that they act against their own interests and support policies that favor the interests of others.


    by David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 3:51pm

    Speak of the Krauts and the American Dream, here is Der Spiegel's take:

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447,00.html

    The Desperate States of America are loud and distressed. The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it's also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country's capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don't believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.

    And if America is indeed on the downward slope, it will have consequences for the global economy and the political world order.

    The fall of America doesn't have to be a complete collapse -- it is, after all, a country that has managed to reinvent itself many times before. But today it's no longer certain -- or even likely -- that everything will turn out fine in the end. The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.

    The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance -- it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them.

    But will the US wake up? Or is it already much too late?

    Spiegel is Germany's most serious magazine.

    by David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:04pm

    The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think.

    The solidarity they speak of was left over from WWII, I believe when the whole country was together and White Alglo Saxon Protestants were still the majority. Both population wise as well as socially and politically. But the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War drove a chisel into this solidarity, which was superficial at best.  The northern states and southern states tolerated each other and the west coast was left to do it's own thing, as it were.

    Now we have regional as well as ethnic and economic divisions that have been growing wider and wider since then. If one looks at the current demographics of this country you can see ethnic regions that are growing more and more saturated with one culture or another. A sign, to me at any rate, of some major divisions that Washington and the two party system may not be able to over come.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 5:39pm

    I think you have got it exactly right Cmaukonen. The most absolutely tragic irony in America's history IMHO is that the Civil Rights movement killed social democracy in the USA.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 6:49am

    Google is your friend as to homework for David Seaton:

    Germany's identity crisis = About 444,000 results

    Russia's identity crisis = About 394,000 results

    Turkey's identity crisis = About 269,000 results

    etc.

    Wikipedia too:

    Demographics of the United States

    ...Immigration
    13% of the population was foreign-born in 2009.[64]....

    Immigration to the United States

    ....As of 2006, the United States accepts more legal immigrants as permanent residents than all other countries in the world combined.[1] Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965,[2] the number of first- generation immigrants living in the United States has quadrupled,[3] from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007.[4] 1,046,539 persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. The leading emigrating countries to the United States were Mexico, India, and the Philippines.[5]....

    And as to that whole "Dream Vacuum"/Calvin-Coolidge-quote-thing, as dismally degraded as they might have become in the recent past, we still have chances to start over like foreclosure procedures and bankruptcy courts and the like, unlike some other countries of particular note. How many late night teevee ads still start out with a narrative along these lines: "a few years ago, I was down on my luck, not a penny to my name..."?

    As for personal ancedotals, this is still very much operative in my little nabe in da Bronx:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QS7wWzwak4

    And another: using Angie's list, I have been unable to find any American citizen to do recent house repair work (examples: bathroom shower demo and shower pan replacement, re-tile, replace sheetrock, paint, gutter repair, fence repair.) Every single one that was called for an estimate and every single one hired has been an immigrant with immigrant help. Not only that, but not a single one will work for less than $30 per hour, they seem to have formed an informal union somehow, as they are not interested in underbidding each other but rather seem willing to turn down jobs if the hirer isn't willing to pay that much per hour per worker, including breaks and trips for supplies. I am certain results vary from mine around the nation, however, like I said, the old dreams still seem very much operative from where I sit.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:38pm

    Gee Art, you sure never have know many Germans... one thing is to be embarrased for their country (who wouldn't be in their case?) and quite another to have any doubt about who they are.

    As to immigration, we are getting loads of low skilled Mexicans, but as Zakaria points out the better skilled types are having second thoughts.

    In Spain, everybody who visits the US these days comes back with stories about how bad the infrastructure is and how frazzled the lower middle class appears to be. I think I've heard at least ten people in the last couple of months tell me that stuff.

    People are horrified by this Tea Party business and if the TPs do well tomorrow, the USA's reputation will suffer terriblly.

    In short:

    There is no Russian Dream, no German Dream, no Spanish Dream and the English would find the entire idea of an English Dream hilarious. Americans live for their dreams... Globalization is a "wake up and smell the coffee" thing. The Tea Party is to help keep Americans waking up and "face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."


    by David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:44pm

    you sure never have know many Germans

    Sloppy, sloppy retort. I didn't say anything about Germans here one way or another, I just gave a link to a google search.

    And not that it matters, but not only do I happen to have German heritage and come from a heavily German-American city, but also had several gen-u-ine German clients for several years with whom I also spent a lot of personal time and traveled back and forth to Germany to work with. Rolf, a bourgeois conservative with a townhouse in Munich and a big house in Murnau, with a big round statisfiled belly was the most interesting one. He tried to immigrate to the U.S. as a young man right after the war but couldn't make it in, (He was drafted into the service at the tail end of the war as a young teen--all he would say about it is "it was the shits." About Hitler he would only say "us kids were crazy about him, we were the nuts" and again "it was the shits.") He loved Manhattan and its skyscrapers, and would wax poetic about their beauty and the expense of the materials, saying the cathedrals in Europe couldn't compare. ) He formed a computer data business in Munich in the 60's, and after making his little fortune in that, he played art dealer by buying German art in America to resell in Germany, traveling across the U.S. to do it, and mostly losing money at it. He never failed to lecture me in his stilted English about how lucky I was to be born in America, how boring Germany was and how nobody there had the gumption to do anything great, how lousy his country was was one of his favorite topics. Now yes I know he is not every German, but he did seem to have quite a few friends that thought exactly like him.

    But since you apparently didn't look at what kind of returns one gets from google on topic for each country, but merely presumed that for Germany they would be about the old bloody stain of the holocaust thing, I'll take the second google result to show you that you may be the one who is thinking stereotypically:

    Germany's identity crisis

    Article Abstract:

    Germany's leading playwright Heiner Muller was interviewed on his views regarding the German essence. He says that Germany has a problem on national identity and unity. Throughout history, the German nation was only a response to another power or force but it did not have a natural and self-defined unit.

    author: Snell, Marilyn Berlin
    Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
    Publication Name: New Perspectives Quarterly
    Subject: Political science
    ISSN: 0893-7850
    Year: 1993 
    Germany, Beliefs, opinions and attitudes, National characteristics, Nationalism, Muller, Heiner

    Read more: http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Political-science/Germanys-identity-crisis-The-art-of-place.html#ixzz144C813XJ
    You know what, David Seaton? I'm coming around to believing that all you mainly blog about is simplistic stereotyping. Finding raison d'etre for simplistic stereotypes really does seem to be your thing. You noted a stereotype at age 5 or 10, and your entire life you spend trying to prove it true. Rather than trying to learn or see nuance, any nuance.

    by artappraiser on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 8:35pm

    And on this

    as Zakaria points out the better skilled types are having second thoughts.

    I think you are simplistically misreading him, I don't see anywhere that he's implying more skilled individuals having "second thoughts." Rather, he's talking about corporate decisions within current globalized norm.

    The problem is actually being addressed in more detail in the debate between Dean Baker and Bernard Avishai over at TPM Cafe. Baker has a very apropos paragraph:

    The way we have selectively opened the economy for trade has hurt many workers. While it is very easy for Wal-Mart to buy clothes and toys from the lowest cost producers in the world or for G.M. to buy steel from the lowest cost producers, it is very difficult for universities to bring in the lowest cost qualified professors in the world or hospitals to bring in the lowest cost qualified doctors in the world. [Note the word "difficult" does not mean impossible - save the electrons required to tell me that your doctor is from India - if we had free trade in professional services, everyone's doctor would be from India.]

    I will spare you the google search for articles saying that most Indian doctors would love to be practicing in the U.S if they could; I know they are out there because I've read more than a few pieces saying as much. And, like Dean Baker jokes, I have also encountered how the staff at many U.S. hospitals is heavily foreign. (I will note, however, the Mr. Zakaria himself doesn't say: things have gotten so bad here in the U.S. that I am thinking I can do better for myself by going home to Mumbai where Mom still is and where all the big media are currently headquartered., hah)

    Now you spare me how you will no doubt twist that--i.e., Americans are too stupid and ill-educated these days to compete with foreigners in professional occupations. I instead see: many people of all skill levels and all classes still want to immigrate to U.S. as they have always wanted to. Simply because it offers a second chance where there's no uniculture, whether the economy is floundering or not. You're not going to change my perspective on that with the simplistic level of your argument, as long as it always seems to be "America is going downhill," no matter what the actual topic. And the tea party is vritually the same 1/3 of the country that bedeviled Clinton in the 90's, and it's going to take a generation or more for their numbers to change, the danger, or not, as regarding them has not cahnged. They will inevitably win some elections by picking up some independents in the "through the old bums out" years, as they have done in the past.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 6:16pm

    Here you go Art, put this into your pipe and smoke it:


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 6:55am

    Excellent blog David. Economic globalization falls squarely under the law of unintended consequences. And to many it sounded so good too.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 7:27pm

    With each passing day, each passing campaign event, each passing debate, each passing revelation about Tea Party candidates, the prospect of the Tea Party being placed ina position of power goes from frightening, to terrifying, to outright dangerous to our Democracy. Like sheep in wolves clothing, the Tea Party represents the most dangerous terrorist threat this country faces, all wrapped in the false veneer of being patriots. They are anything but as shown here - http://wp.­me/pNmlT-v­w


    by Dan H (not verified) on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 3:02pm

    More drool.

    Drawn at random:

    1. The Turks. Right, Turks never turn. And never give up! Never surrender! Which is how they won the Korean War. And why they dominate the Earth today.

    Don't believe me? Ask the Turks! 

    And I love that whole thing about how the Turks "were Anatolian peasants, pious Muslims... for them, the Chinese might as well have been Martians, or goats... having anything to do with them... was unthinkable for the Turks....."

    Have you ever read a book, David? A history book? Ever read anyone babble on like this about the Soviets or Red Chinese or fanatic believers or tribesmen of whatever ilk gets you most excited? Did you manage to figure out that it was complete crap, David? Because it was. People of every race colour and creed... break or change or come over or surrender or whatever.

    This was stuff you read... AS A KID.

    2. And the Germans! Do you realize who you sound like in PLUMPING FOR nation states like these? The ones where "people all speak the same language, and have done so for centuries, have been intermarrying for so long that they all bear a family resemblance to each other, have a common history and usually a common religious heritage."

    So.... let me get this straight... as long as we all look like we're all related, i.e. the same, then things aren't so bad. 

    So, ummmm, the evidence shows that Canada and Australia and the US clearly soared above European nations in lacking generosity, becoming unfriendly, and closing doors. 

    Right.

    I'll bet you felt wise, gargling shit like this. A regular Thomas Friedman, you are these days.

    3. And you then describe how a nation such as this, "is able to go through tremendous shocks like a carbonized Germany did at the end of World War Two... without any serious "identity crisis".'  WTF?

    What about WW1? How'd the Germans do coming out of that one? Any "identity crisis" you  can think of?

    And Russia? No identity crisis there at all. Other than losing whole great chunks of the USSR. Which, in EACH case, produced massive debates about Russia, Russianness, etc etc., from the tens of millions within those borders. Which, apparently, YOU don't count as in any way involving Russia or Russianness. And any back-talk occurring in Russia? Apparently, it wasn't happening at the table next to you, so... it didn't exist!  

    4. And then your totalist bilge about the US. "A growthless America would finally strangle and extinguish... generosity, openness, friendliness and the willingness to take risks and empower all those American defects that the world loathes: greed, violence and racism."

    I cannot believe a grown-up actually wrote that sort of shit. 

    Look across the various U.S. REGIONS, David. There are REGIONS, and cities and neighbourhoods and families which "go without growth" all the time. You can see the same thing in every single nation.

    And WHOOPS, surprise, is doesn't always and inevitably lead to a loss of generosity, friendliness, etc. In FACT, what you often see is the OPPOSITE. They're often regarded as MORE friendly and open and generous. Take rural New England of the Atlantic Provinces of Canada or the North of the UK or Scotland.

    You just talk straight up bollocks, David. You've gone nutbar, with these grand generalities and great sweeping stories. 

    5. How about SPAIN, David? And the rest of Europe. According to you, them being real nation states, they should have NO problem with a downturn in growth. Why, you certainly won't see THEM becoming less generous or open or friendly! NO HISTORY OF THAT AT ALL, EH? 

    Talk about "Decontenting!" That's the right term, alright.

    The right term to describe your recent blogs.

    Take the week off.


    by quinn esq on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:03pm

    According to you, them being real nation states, they should have NO problem with a downturn in growth. Why, you certainly won't see THEM becoming less generous or open or friendly!

    Quinn,

    American open friendliness is legendary. So as to Europeans: open, generous and friendly like Americans they aren't. Believe me most Europeans don't get chummy with people until they have known them for some time, the English don't even speak to people they haven't been introduced to. Spanish people are engulfed in their families, to make a real friend is a long process, but once there you have something very valuable.

     As to Russia, my favorite source is Orlov, watch his video, it's very entertaining

    Everybody in the developed countries are having the same problems with globalization. Germany is doing better than most because they still have a strong, competitive industrial base that makes stuff you can't download for free from The Pirate Bay.

    As to the rest of your rant, how do you explain the Tea Party "movement"? Why is such craziness appear about to freeze the political system?


    by David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:20pm

    My problem, David, is that even though you present as a "man of the Left," your explanations increasingly come down to race, ethnicity, purity. 

    When you talk about Germany actually still having an industrial base, THERE I think you're onto something. I think this has been a huge issue all along. But it has very little to do with the whole ethnic purity side of a nation. The Brits are finance-dominated, for instance. But they needn't have been, except that North Sea oil kicked in and the revenues enabled Thatcher to destroy her political opponents in the industrialized North of England - and the manufacturing base with it. But each nation has its own story. The Italians have kept chunks of industry, but it varies across their regions. etc.

    What I don't see as very useful - at all - is this "national characteristics" bit, much less the ethnic/racial dimensions. Take Canada. We're the most economically successful nation in the West right now. Solid banks. good fiscal basis. Real estate prices still going up. National medicine. And yet, Canada is the most multi-cultural nation in the West. MOST. And it's really not an issue, at all.

    But maybe I should try to explain that by looking at our national and ethnic differences with the US, the most striking of which is.... that we replaced those of Spanish descent with French? Hmmmmm. How well would that go down, in your books, as a theory? Think the French are inherently better at making stuff and running stuff than the Spanish? 

    Same with policy in most Western nations these days, I find. Take the UK. Am I supposed to imagine the nation's course is determined these days by "Englishness?" Or maybe the Scottishness of Gordon Brown or the Jewishness of the Milibands?

    In most nations, I think we're going to see all sorts of lurching about, racist and non, insular and open, and it's just impossibly hard to explain these as being driven by national character. 

    The Tea Party? I know these blowhards. But the same sort of people sit all over Europe. The Ingerrrrland hooligans and aristocratic racists, for starters. Same in France and Germany. Nothing enormously special about this lot. Might as well be Pierre Poujade, whose little movement was the one that most resonated - for me - when looking at North American Hard Right politics. Here:

    Poujadism

    On 23 July 1953, with a group of about 20 persons, Poujade prevented inspectors of the tax board from verifying the income of another shopkeeper. This was the start of a tax protest movement by shopkeepers, first in the Lot, then in Aveyron, and finally the whole south of Massif Central.

    After the war, Poujade was the owner of a book and stationery store.

    On 29 November 1953, Pierre Poujade created the Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans(UDCA), to organize the tax protesters. This movement would soon be called Poujadism.

    Poujadism flourished most vigorously in the last years of the French Fourth Republic, and articulated the economic interests and grievances of shopkeepers and other proprietor-managers of small businesses facing economic and social change. The main themes of Poujadism were articulated around the defense of the common man against the elites.

    Besides the protest against the income tax, and the price control imposed by Antoine Pinay to limit inflation, Poujadism was opposed toindustrialization, urbanization, and American-style modernization, which were perceived as a threat to the identity of rural France. Poujadism denounced the French state as rapetout et inhumain (thieving and inhuman). The defense of the common man lead to antiparliamentatism (Poujade called the Chamber of Deputies "the biggest brothel in Paris" and the deputies a "pile of rubbish" andpederasts) a strong anti-intellectualism (Poujade denounced the graduates from École Polytechnique as the main culprits for the woes of 1950s France and boasted that he had no book learning), xenophobia, and antisemitism especially aimed against Pierre Mendès-France(claiming "Mendès is French only as the word added to his name"), who was perceived as responsible for the loss of Indochina.Poujadism also supported the cause of French Algeria.

    Political involvement

    In 1955, the UDCA was a strong political movement, with 400,000 members. Its adherents were encouraged to protest against taxes and withdraw their deposits from state-owned banks. The movement called for new Estates General to re-found the French political regime and published the Fraternité Française newspaper.

    The UDCA secured 53 seats in the National Assembly in 1956. The youngest member of parliament, elected on a UDCA list, was Jean-Marie Le Pen, then leader of the youth branch of UDCA. Poujade was opposed to decolonization of Algeria, and to the European Defence Community. To justify his support to the Algerian War, Poujade declared in 1956 to Time Magazine:

    "Big Wall Street syndicates found incredibly rich oil deposits in the Sahara, but instead of exploiting the discovery, they capped the wells and turned the Algerians against us...All this is a great diabolic scheme to dismember France. Already the Saar is gone, and soon the Italians will want Corsica...As for those who are against us, I need only say: let them go back to Jerusalem. We'll even be glad to pay their way.

    After the French Fifth Republic began in 1958 under Charles de Gaulle's presidency, Poujade and his party largely faded from view. Poujade distanced himself from Le Pen and declared in 2002 that he would have preferred to break his own leg than to make him a deputy.

    Sound at all familiar?


    by quinn esq on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:44pm

    I think ethnic purity is horseshit, but that is because I am an American, I have an Irish great grandmother, a German great grandfather and mother, a Scottish great, great grandfather and an endless polyceltic grouping of Scots, Scotch-Irish etc, going back to the early 1700s. Half my family is Protestant and half Catholic with two great aunts who were cloistered nuns and an uncle on the other side who was 32 degree Mason. I have no roots, no clan and no tribe and precious little living family except for my German wife and we both live in Spain.

    However, I have been able to observe that my situation, while fairly typical for an American is not frequent anywhere else. Most of the world is organized around such identities as the Han Chinese, Brahmin Indians, English, Germans and the like. They have survived for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Now it is our turn to see if we can take it as well as we dish it out.


    by David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:56pm

    You don't really bother actually replying to what people have said, do you? You just slap down the next random thought that wanders through your brain, and that classifies as a reply.

    I mean, WTF were you trying to say back there? All these fabulous national characteristics, that they fall to pieces once people have left the Mother country? Or in the case of the Scots-Irish, they carry on? What if a German moves to Poland or Austria or Russia, and then back? do they change? Or if a Scot goes to London? 

    I don't think you actually spend much time thinking about this stuff and whether or not it actually explains anything. It's just you spewing your favourite prejudices.

    Here's a test question for you, David. What's the #1 national origin of those who've come to the US over the centuries?

    German. 

    German, by a lonnnnnng way. Any impact on your theory at all? Probably not. Because it's not even much of a theory really, it's just a big trashcan you place out front of your mouth, into which you throw whatever national and ethnic ideas you have that day.

    Americans... are mostly German.

    More Germans in the US than there were in East Germany.

    Once a German, always a German.

    Well, I guess we can pretty much predict the responses of huge chunks of the US from that German thing, eh?

    This should go well.


    by quinn esq on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 6:17pm

    You don't really bother actually replying to what people have said, do you?

    I really like it best when commentators fight among themselves. However, I think I stated my case pretty clearly in my post, it goes more or less like this:

    1. I think America's social fabric is woven principally around the "dream" of upward social mobility and material prosperity. That's why most of our ancestors arrived on America's shores.
    2. Anything that threatens that "dream", seriously threatens America's "domestic tranquility", which the Constitution considers fundamental to "ensure".
    3. Globalization as it is presently organized is threatening the upward mobility and material prosperity of America's workers, the middle class and those who aspire to the middle class.
    4. To change that situation would require much regulation.
    5. That would cost the "good and the great" a lot of power and "freedom".
    6. They stir up the inherent social and racial tensions of America's crazy quilt society in order to thwart any curtailment of their power, wealth and prestige.
    7. Precisely today, election day, we will see if my theory is correct.
    8. I hope I'm wrong.

    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 6:40am

    BTW Quinn,

    Americans... are mostly German.

    The English always say that this is precisely why Americans are more unpleasantly square headed and fanatically nationalist than other English speaking peoples


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 6:43am

    So today's election will test your theory?

    My God. Your head's caved in.


    by quinn esq on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 12:21pm

    And.... barp.


    by quinn esq on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 12:21pm

    First, thanks for the interesting roundup on Poujade.

    Second, taking inspiration from your first sentence, I'd like to make some suggestions for forthcoming David Seaton blog topics, to offer some variety. as opposed to constantly repeating classics like"Jews are fatiguing" and "Americans have grown fat and stupid, everyone I know that's been there says so" and "the Spanish people are family-centric." I suspect at least several of the following might interest him:

    Mexicans are really lazy.

    The Roma have a petty crime problem.

    Afro-Americans dance good and I love their music.

    In East Asia, life is cheap.

    Irish are really drunks.

    Canadians are funny because...

    I wonder sometimes if it's a sophisticated troll technique to get comments and traffic, creating an irresistable urge to counter the stereotypes he presents. Here's hoping I find the strength to find it more resistable in the future.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 5:39pm

    My grandfather said that one of the saddest lessons he ever learned in life was how much truth there was in truisms. Ask any cop.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 6:21am

    quinn is b eginning to sound like a TP Nationalist.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 5:47pm

    It is time for me to eat dinner and go to bed... so I'm not ignoring anybody's comments, I'm simply asleep...


    by David Seaton on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:57pm

    Another great essay. Another series of great comments.

    Like others have asked: What is America and what does it mean to be an American.

    But I can sit down with a group of women in their 50's from the cities, like  I did a few years ago, and two of the women will note that there is a Black Menace out there and it cannot be ignored.

    I can exchange some small talk with some of the residents up here and they will tell you that Black People perspire differently from us 'white folk' and that minorities threaten the very fabric of our society.  Like we have a real threat from minorities in a state with relatively few minorities.

    C was catistigated for taking to broad a stroke in criticizing southern Whites...well yeah if you take into consideration the racism and ethnocentrism of the north I suppose. hahaha

    There is an article in the Beast about why game show hosts are all repubs. haahahah

    The American Dream or rather the American lie that a nobody can become a somebody. While all the time it is simply a lottery and some folks get more tickets.


    by Richard Day on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 6:08pm

    Monte Hall & Alex Trebek & Howie Mandel are all.... Canucks. 

    We were going for a game show sweep, but Bob Barker beat the shit out of Happy Gilmore, and we had to hold back for a while.

    http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoId=4889...


    by quinn esq on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 6:26pm

    Actually, I was 'castigating' you for the same thing, DD; I have the scars to prove it.  I think it's just.plain.wrong.  And I do get that it is 'fun'.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 6:55pm

    Yep DD. We is all cre-a-ted equals. Cepting some is more equals dan others.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 7:26pm

    You got that right C. hahaha


    by Richard Day on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 7:30pm

    Did you know that Japanese people find the smell of caucasians disgusting?Laughing


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 7:29am

    Keep digging, David. Keep digging.


    by Donal on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 10:01am

    One of the biggest delusions that the left insists on hanging on to is that America is one big happy family or could be if we only just tried hard enough.

    Donkey dung. We have never been one big happy family. We started out as groups of ner-do-wells and malcontents who had only one thing in common. We hated where we came from and wanted to be anywhere else and this is the anywhere we chose.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 7:32pm

    "C" is my manCool


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 7:27am

    Really? Then why are you so scared of the "tea party" crowd? They are a standard part of our country, the same 1/3 that hated Clinton, and their equivalents are a standard part of many other countries.

    And that reminds me--what happened to the David Seaton that wanted McCain to win over Obama because he thought that would radicalize the electorate to true liberalism as opposed to settling for centrism? Now that the GOP, with some crazies leading them, are probably going to gain some power, you've changed your mind?


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 10:18am

    Actually a centrist or "moderate" Republican president like McCain used to be would have probably kept the Tea Party down.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 12:55pm

    I guess it feels good to high-five each other over your agreement on the nature of humanity and its divisions being almost innate.  I don't think a sentence like this: "One of the biggest delusions that the left insists on hanging on to is that America is one big happy family or could be if we only just tried hard enough." is anything but a cynical twisting of what many try to acknowledge, and that is that it's hard, but necessary task, to appeal to each other's Better Angels or innate humanity and empathy for others.  MLK says it pretty well.  In a comment stream I read under an economics blog recently, people were comparing (roughly) Hobbes/Locke v. Rousseau, and found this far more nuanced:

     

    "There is a strange dichotomy of disturbing dualism within human nature. Many of the great philosophers and thinkers through the ages have seen this. It caused Ovid the Latin poet to say, “I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.” It caused even Saint Augustine to say “Lord, make me pure, but not yet.” So that that is in human nature. Plato, centuries ago said that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions, so that within our own individual lives we see this conflict and certainly when we come to the collective life of man, we see a strange badness. But in spite of this there is something in human nature that can respond to goodness. So that man is neither innately good nor is he innately bad; he has potentialities for both. So in this sense, Carlyle was right when he said that, “there are depths in man which go down to the lowest hell, and heights which reach the highest heaven, for all are not both heaven and hell made out of him, ever-lasting miracle and mystery he is?” Man has the capacity to be good, man has the capacity to be evil.

    And so the nonviolent resister never lets this idea go, that there is something within human nature that can respond to goodness. So that a Jesus of Nazareth or a Mohandas Gandhi, can appeal to human beings and appeal to that element of goodness within them, and a Hitler can appeal to the element of evil within them. But we must never forget that there is something within human nature that can respond to goodness, that man is not totally depraved…
    "

    –Martin Luther King, Jr., “Love, Law and Civil Disobedience,” address before the annual meeting of the Fellowship of the Concerned, 16 November 1961

     


    by we are stardust on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 9:55am

    I think people were "responding to goodness" when they voted for Barack Obama, but as so often happens in American merchandising they are now suffering "buyer's remorse".


    by David Seaton on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 1:46pm

    But damn....the pic looked so good on ebay and the seller said it was in perfect condition.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 2:28pm

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