💬 While class consciousness and economic thinking divide a nation horizontally, holistic national consciousness unites a nation vertically.
Cf the cyclical dance throughout history acted out by incompatible mindsets of Spatials and Temporals—a dance Michael McConkey picked out and fleshed out in extended series of characteristically scholarly essays 😊 --> thecirculationofelites.substack.com/p/spatials-v-temporals
🗨 Space biased media, institutions, and related societies, tended to emphasize expansion through commercial, administrative, or military means. Time biased examples of the same emphasized durability through a focus on religion, tradition, and history.
That distinction between space bias and time bias explains a lot. In the USA, if a policy's costs will need to be paid on the next President's or CEO's watch, then the current administration considers the policy essentially free, no matter how catastrophic the costs are likely to end up being.
Not presactly: in topical politics, high time preference and fast life history strategy hold enough explanatory power; no need for overarching McConkey's framework 😉
Yes indeed. Everyone is operating on a four to six year window. It's very fortunate that the distracted and drugged electorate can't remember events that happened less than a year ago. A cynical person might say that this was by design.
From a purely academic perspective/ suggestion you might want to take a look at Robert Gellately’s 2020 book. That “experiment” went horribly horribly horribly off course, but the contrary forces you identified were similarly recognized back then, in detail. FYI
PS: It might be that the two forces need to be kept in a healthy balance and that when one predominates excessively over the other disaster results?
Any kind of solidarity, whether class or national, relies on the groups ability to detect and punish cheaters. The larger the group gets, the harder this becomes.
FYI your links do not open properly from within Gmail, but they do on substack itself. not sure if this is working as intended from substacks perspective or not
This is fair - however class stratification inevitably emerges in a meritocratic system. Better to formalise, even sacralise these distinctions to bring them under a holistic nation-state concept.
I vigorously agree with the aim of the article, but I suspect that this is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The upper classes established class conflict as a central portion of the national agenda during the New Deal when the adjustment costs of desegregation in education were born by those who could not afford private schools. Reagan's amnesty for illegals and the perpetuation of the Sunbelt agenda (open shop, open borders) exacerbated this by an order of magnitude.
Democracy selects/elects for sociopaths over time.
And debt-usury finance ultimately enslaves the Nation to the money-power
The elected psychopaths then readily do their bidding
The working class are first to suffer from the mass immigration and export of manufacturing etc but this works its way up the chain
Here in Oz a lot of University places for the professions are now filled by Chinese and Indian students instead of the children of the upper classes
💬 While class consciousness and economic thinking divide a nation horizontally, holistic national consciousness unites a nation vertically.
Cf the cyclical dance throughout history acted out by incompatible mindsets of Spatials and Temporals—a dance Michael McConkey picked out and fleshed out in extended series of characteristically scholarly essays 😊 --> thecirculationofelites.substack.com/p/spatials-v-temporals
🗨 Space biased media, institutions, and related societies, tended to emphasize expansion through commercial, administrative, or military means. Time biased examples of the same emphasized durability through a focus on religion, tradition, and history.
That distinction between space bias and time bias explains a lot. In the USA, if a policy's costs will need to be paid on the next President's or CEO's watch, then the current administration considers the policy essentially free, no matter how catastrophic the costs are likely to end up being.
Not presactly: in topical politics, high time preference and fast life history strategy hold enough explanatory power; no need for overarching McConkey's framework 😉
Yes indeed. Everyone is operating on a four to six year window. It's very fortunate that the distracted and drugged electorate can't remember events that happened less than a year ago. A cynical person might say that this was by design.
From a purely academic perspective/ suggestion you might want to take a look at Robert Gellately’s 2020 book. That “experiment” went horribly horribly horribly off course, but the contrary forces you identified were similarly recognized back then, in detail. FYI
PS: It might be that the two forces need to be kept in a healthy balance and that when one predominates excessively over the other disaster results?
Any kind of solidarity, whether class or national, relies on the groups ability to detect and punish cheaters. The larger the group gets, the harder this becomes.
FYI your links do not open properly from within Gmail, but they do on substack itself. not sure if this is working as intended from substacks perspective or not
This is fair - however class stratification inevitably emerges in a meritocratic system. Better to formalise, even sacralise these distinctions to bring them under a holistic nation-state concept.
I vigorously agree with the aim of the article, but I suspect that this is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The upper classes established class conflict as a central portion of the national agenda during the New Deal when the adjustment costs of desegregation in education were born by those who could not afford private schools. Reagan's amnesty for illegals and the perpetuation of the Sunbelt agenda (open shop, open borders) exacerbated this by an order of magnitude.