What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Razgovory]

Democratic messaging works just fine for me.  If left leaning voters can't be arsed to go the polls and beat back the Orcs maybe the problem is with them and not the messaging.

I think the messaging that sucks is taking credit for accomplishments.  I guess the problem is that it doesn't sell in the news.  "Woman murdered in park last night" sells the news, "woman had a fulfilling first date" doesn't.  Similarly, it's hard to fill the airwaves of 24/7 news channels with "quality of governance improving slowly" headline items, even if that ultimately has a much greater impact in someone's life than the next bullshit scandal.

Just to be clear: is  "Woman murdered in park last night" and  "woman had a fulfilling first date" the same story?

[Berkut]

I think you take great pride in imagining that I take great pride in my moderation, because attacking motives is always easier then attacking arguments.

In point of fact, I take zero "pride" in being a moderate. I don't think there is any functional utility in it at all, nor do I think I am in fact "moderate" anyway, except insofar as I don't agree lockstep with every absurd thing the left trots out as a matter of course. If that means I am a moderate, then whatever, but I don't take pride in it at all, and if you decide that moderate means I support some particular stance, then I certainly have no problem stating that I am not going to accept that stance because it is "moderate".

So no, I think I am an expert on what I think and take pride in, and I take zero pride in being "moderate".

I don't know what denouncing a progessist means, at least how it could possibly apply to me. The definition of the word is "  A person who favours or advocates progress, especially in political or social matters; a reformer, a progressive."

I don't know why I would denounce something I completely support. It is interesting that you define someone who is a progressive, and defines themselves using exactly that term, as being anti-progressive, because they again, are willing to call things the radical left cherishes absurd - even when you actually agree that those things are wrong, but object to calling them absurd! You just said I was anti-progressive based strictly on my views around things like the 1619 project not being 100% awesomesauce, while ignoring my actual views on actual policy.

I did not say being a moderate gives me advantage in conversation, I said finding myself in the non-crazy part of the political spectrum seems like an inately strong position to be in - but of course, that is only relative to the crazy left. I am sure most people who do not call themselves progressives in America would in fact laugh at the idea that I am a "moderate" at all - I am lefty progressive who thinks we should have universal health care, the government should fund public higher education, we should radically restrict many guns, and we should increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to levels that have not been seen for decades in order to fund a massive effort to combat climate change. I think we should take a very serious look at our economic systems and incentives to figure out how to stop and ideally reverse the wealth ineqality we have seen grown in the last decades. In every case, outside the social justice warrior love for identity politics and cancel culture, my political position would be defined in US terms as anything but moderate.

As far as my own political activism is concerned, I do what I think works for me. If you notice that it is the most extreme elements who tend to do the most, well, ok - but that is true for the crazies on the right as well. Personally, I actually don't think that burning down police stations or rioting is particularly effective in the long run, even while I understand why it happens. 

I do give time, and I give a lot of money, to politicians and causes I think are important. I will pass on demonstrating, in most cases. 

[Eddie Teach]

I feel like Skinner may be on to something.

[Sheilbh]

And you read those statements, writings, correspondence, what comes across is that some planters had complex and even guilty feelings about slavery but at the same time conformed to and followed the interests of their class.  The late 18th century was not the 1850s - you would not expect to see lots defiant "moral" justifications of slavery among the leading men.  But at the same time you see men very conscious of their status position in society, of the wealth required to maintain that status, and the sources of their wealth.  One may label it as "Marxist" to draw the inference that when a historical person acts consistently with economic self-interest, there is likely some connection.  But another label for the same process is "common sense".

Yeah - also the way people express sentiments, including describing their own beliefs and justifying their own action, are shaped by the society they live in. That doesn't mean they are dissembling or don't believe those things, but it also doesn't necessarily mean they do because their way of thinking and their concerns are structured by wider social concerns. That's something that historians are - or should be - alive to and they are making a judgement call of what weight to give those different factors, which can include material self-interest. It's not a case of lies being told with perfect consistency it's the effect of the way their society spoke and understood the world.

An analogy from today would be the criticism of "woke capitalism" - the statements on issues of social justice by billionaires and multi-millionaires and corporates. I have no doubt that some of that is sincerely and deeply felt. Some of it I think is just that it is a language of our time and a way of expressing yourself. I also think some of it, frankly, is mainly motivated economic self interest - this is the language your target market uses, so you embrace it to increase sales. I think we probably all have varying degrees of cynicism about that - that also applies to the past.

The reality in most cases is that humans are a mix of all those motivations - noble ideals, discourse and self-interest. We don't ever, I think, know ourselves well enough to accurately weigh those competing aspects and I think it's certainly impossible to do it about someone else's thoughts. If they're writing to others - we normally want people to think well of us and put forward what we perceive to be our best foot. In a way I think it's even stronger in diarising or memoirs (especially memoirs which are aimed at publication) because we all sub-consciously massage reality so that we look a little better, are a little nobler and more purely motivated, a little less venal. I don't think any of us could really honestly describe ourselves, our beliefs or our motivations.

In the context of the American Revolution - as you say this is broadly pre-scientific racism as a justification for slavery and the ideas and discourse that is shaping these people is the Enlightenment. So that is the language they will use - it's the language of their age and their contemporaries. And in relation to slavery they don't have that later scientific racism of the 19th century to justify it, they are confronted with the theories of the day which are universalist and Enlightenment and there is a dissonance there. The same occurs in writings of some British figures in relation to India where they know they're despoiling and looting an ancient civilisation, they don't really have the language of "civilising mission" to justify it (and know it's not really true) but materially are benefiting from it. I don't think we should simply believe, but we also shouldn't just dismiss it.

It reminds a little of the various swings opinion over the English civil war/war of three kingdoms - over whether the motivations are primarily political (a Whiggish take), a bourgeois revolution (the Marxist take) or a war of religion. I have no idea - I probably lean more to the war of religion view - but think all three are essential elements in producing the context in which a war could take place. That doesn't mean that Christopher Hill or the Marxist take is wrong, or unhelpful, or useless. It's quite illuminating and important - same goes for the Whig history. But I also acknowledge that the war of religion explanation is strengthened by the incredibly religiously tinged and shaped discourse of that time - it's the old point that Cromwell's religious exhortations always neatly align with his own interest (but I don't think that means they're insincere).

[Berkut]

SHelf, that is all well understood reasons why we have talked about for the last 100+ years the hypocrisy, known at that time, of the American Revolution. 

It does not in any way advance the notion that said Revolution was undertaken primarily in order to protect slavery.

You are just re-stating what historians have been discussing for decades. It isn't even a little bit controversial. 

Same with Minsky. You guys are lecturing everyone as if you are the first to notice that the same guy who said "We hold these truths to be self-evident....that all men are created equal...." was a slaveowner.

The absurd part is going from that, to this rather interesting and "new" conclusion, put forth (and then quietly abandoned) by some of the prominent authors associated with the 1619 project, that the American Revolution happened because the men who decided to rebel against England thought that if they did not, England would force them to give up slavery. That absent slavery, there is no American Revolution at all.

This is an astounding claim, and has no real evidence to support it, at least nothing even close to enough weight to overcome the massive evidence to counter it. And again, people smarter then me have already pointed that out.

[Sheilbh]

So that wasn't my point. It's not about hypocrisy - which I think is probably an unhelpful way of framing it and probably not how it was experienced. I probably didn't express it well but I'm not sure it'll add much I'd try again.

[FunkMonk]

It reminds a little of the various swings opinion over the English civil war/war of three kingdoms - over whether the motivations are primarily political (a Whiggish take), a bourgeois revolution (the Marxist take) or a war of religion. I have no idea - I probably lean more to the war of religion view - but think all three are essential elements in producing the context in which a war could take place. That doesn't mean that Christopher Hill or the Marxist take is wrong, or unhelpful, or useless. It's quite illuminating and important - same goes for the Whig history. But I also acknowledge that the war of religion explanation is strengthened by the incredibly religiously tinged and shaped discourse of that time - it's the old point that Cromwell's religious exhortations always neatly align with his own interest (but I don't think that means they're insincere).

Yeah, that's what makes history so interesting to me. Historical events usually have several different forces pulling in lots of different directions, with historical actors of varying degrees of agency and of various different beliefs and motivations. And whatever survives as source material are all that we have to parse out those events, which we then fashion into narratives that we think best explain what happened. And of course what doesn't survive, or what is left unrecorded by contemporary historical people, are things we may never know about. Fascinating stuff.

And it's even more interesting to read different interpretations of the same event that argue diametrically opposed things, especially arguments that exist outside the historical consensus. That is the nature of historical inquiry.

[Berkut]

So that wasn't my point. It's not about hypocrisy - which I think is probably an unhelpful way of framing it and probably not how it was experienced. I probably didn't express it well but I'm not sure it'll add much I'd try again.

Oh, I think it was very much experienced that way. Jefferson himself wrote extensively about slavery and how there would be an eventual price to pay for what they were doing.

But whether that is YOUR point, it is the point you have weighed in to defend.

I think they were incredible aware of just how hypocritical their position was - I think it is fascinating to see how slave owners attitudes changed between the American Revolution and the early to mid 19th century.  Slaveowners in the 18th century relied on slaves to maintain their wealth, but it wasn't a wealth that was that incredibly great compared to their peers, and they could at least imagine a scenario in the future where the slaves were no more. Their wealth was in land.

Personally, I think it basically amounted to economics. Slavery in the late 18th century was important to slaveowners social status and wealth. But after the invention of the cotton gin, slavery became the engine for an economic boom of previously unheard of scale in the Americas. The American South had found the equivalent of Haiti's sugar, and oh how the money rolled in....The numbers are astonishing.

This is just Mississippi, but the numbers are incredible.

In 1800, Mississippi Territory had about 5000 white inhabitants, and about 3500 slaves, and produced no cotton. It was basically uninhabited.
In 1810, it was 23,000 and 17,000 slaves
1830 it was 70,000 and 65,000
1840 it was 180,000 and 195,000
1850 it was 295,000 and 300,000
1860 it was 354,000 and 437,000

By 1860, Missippi was the leading cotton producer in the world, producing 535 million pounds.

In 1790 the US produced, total, less then 1 million pounds of cotton. It was negligible, and represented basically zero percent of US exports. 

1800 it was about 25 million pounds a year.

By 1820, we were producing 160 million pounds a year, and that represented 22% of American exports.

By 1830 it was 331 million pounds, representing 41% of American export value

1840 800+ million pounds, and over half total export value

1850 it reaches a billion pounds

1860 it is over 2.2 billion pounds, representing something like 60-70% of the nation export value.


And you saw the attitude towards slavery shift from this kind of "Well we have slaves but we pretty much know it is terrible and we are almost certainly going to have to do something about that before they rise up and rather justly throw our mastery off but how do we do that????" sort of wringing hands attitude to this pseudo-scientific made up justifaction about racism that allows for the idea of slavery now, and slavery forever. 

This is, IMO, all economics, and all about cotton. Cotton drove the world economy in many ways, and the US had just become the world supplied of this insanely profitable cash crop. It is an oil boom, and the southern slaveowners are now oil barons and there is no fucking way they are going to give up the thing that turned them into some of the wealthiest men on the planet. So all that hand wringing and concern about the hypocrisy and obvious injustice of slavery had to go away and get replaced by something sustainable and defensible, and that something is straight up racism, and not the racism of the 18th century, but the pseudo-scientifically justified racism of white supremacy.

[Berkut]

There has been much made about how the founders "punted" on the slavery question, and how that was rather irresponsible of them.

But you can also argue that they did not know the Eli Whitney would invent the cotton gin, making the production of cotton so incredibly profitable if you had land, labor, and credit, that it would become nearly impossible to actually let slavery die away in the fashion they probably thought it would....Between 1776 and 1800 the population of slaves in the US was pretty steady (500k in 1776, 800k in 1800) and the increase was likely largely accounted for by native growth. It is not hard to imagine that the "problem" of slavery was solvable, and if you waited a bit, perhaps the political will to handle it in some "soft" manner was imaginable.

Of course, once cotton became the "oil" of the global industrial revolution, and the money to be made turned slaveowners into the oil sheiks of the 1th century, the context of the problem changed dramatically, and a political soft landing seemed impossible. I think that helped drive the growing militancy of the abolitionist movement - there was an idea that the explosion of slavery in the south was something of a betrayal of the promise that a solution leading to the end of slavery at some point.

Of course, the south just said that the compromises made in the 1780s were permanent, and any attempt to move towards an end of slavery was intolerable, because there was so very much money to be made....

[viper37]

I think you take great pride in imagining that I take great pride in my moderation

If we are at a point where you are considered a moderate, Languish is in deep shit.

[Barrister]

I think you take great pride in imagining that I take great pride in my moderation, because attacking motives is always easier then attacking arguments.

*snicker*

[The Minsky Moment]

That is dependent on the assumption that they did in fact believe that the only way to protect their self interest was in fact rebellion, and in fact that all the other reasons were not just the reasons claimed, but actually lies formed to obfuscate the real reason.

No its not dependent on that assumption at all, that's a strawman argument.  Obviously, there were many reasons that led people to support the Patriot cause, or the Loyalists, or to prevaricate. Just as obviously, the Patriot ranks included many anti-slavery advocates. 

But in thinking about the 1770s we have to wrench ourselves out of presentist bias and consider what it was like to be a property owner in America on the eve of the Revolution.  Because "property" in the United States back then didn't mean bank accounts, 401(k) plans, bonds, and stocks.  It principally meant two things - in almost precisely equal proportion - agricultural land and slaves.  The market value of bound persons in the 1770s was enormous, approximately 1.5 times annual income of all the colonies.  In the South, where slaveholding was more concentrated, slaves were by a very safe margin the most significant form of property .  This fact always must be kept in mind when we read phrases of the time like "life, liberty, and property."  And it is impossible to properly understand the progress of the Revolution and post-revolutionary settlement without keeping those facts in the front of one's mind.

The assumption therefore is that in deciding which side to support, slaveholding elites did not make their decision purely on the grounds of theoretical commitment to abstract political ideals, but took into consideration what victory for that side would mean for their own status and future prospects, and that necessarily meant careful consideration as to the effects on their principal source of wealth, power, position, and status, slaves.  The southern planters had to take into account that in casting off Britain and tie their fates to their fellow colonies, they were linking themselves to northern colonies with anti-slavery Quakers and Yankees; at the same time they were weighing those dangers against the undeniable fact that the political culture of metropolitan Britain was turning against slavery.  The assumption is that in considering the ultimate failure of the British war time "southern strategy" and in assessing British efforts to win "hearts and minds" in the South, one should consider the impact and effects of British efforts to recruit former slaves into their armies.

Hannah-Jones' emphasis on slavery as a motivation is exaggerated and fair to criticize on that basis, but it would not be absurd to argue that her approach is no worse than other more traditional accounts that widely ignore the issue entirely or downplay it, and indeed may be a helpful foil to those views.

[The Minsky Moment]

The reality in most cases is that humans are a mix of all those motivations - noble ideals, discourse and self-interest. We don't ever, I think, know ourselves well enough to accurately weigh those competing aspects and I think it's certainly impossible to do it about someone else's thoughts. If they're writing to others - we normally want people to think well of us and put forward what we perceive to be our best foot. In a way I think it's even stronger in diarising or memoirs (especially memoirs which are aimed at publication) because we all sub-consciously massage reality so that we look a little better, are a little nobler and more purely motivated, a little less venal. I don't think any of us could really honestly describe ourselves, our beliefs or our motivations.

That is certainly true generally and even more so for that generation of Americans.  It would be hard to think of someone more self-conscious of their reputation and appearance of propriety than George Washington.  Except maybe for Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, [insert American founder here]

[The Minsky Moment]

That is not my conclusion. At this point, I think I have nearly exhausted the different ways to express it. I'll try one last time, in the bluntest way possible. 

Without addressing each point by point:

+ Two old sayings about the Democrats are the Will Rogers line about "I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat" and the saying about candidate selection that "Democrats fall in love, Republican fall in line". These capture certain truths - because Republicans tend be more deferential to authority, their messaging tends to be more disciplined (and simplistic). 

+ That said Democrats are capable of effective messaging - the 2018 elections are an example of that.

+ Messaging and militancy are not the same things.  Militants can have confused or inchoate messaging, moderates can have tight and trenchant messaging. And vice versa.

+ I agree that successful democratic political movements need to have militant elements.  Politics requires a balance both passion and reason.

+ That said, in the American context of deliberately divided political institutions and blocking points, an excess of passion leads to paralysis.  This was deliberate design, the professional revolutionaries who designed the US constitution knew the uses of passions but feared its excesses.

+ At the present moment, US governance has been increasingly paralyzed due to an excess of militancy on its right wing.  Increasing militancy from the left will not fix that blockage.

[Berkut]

That is dependent on the assumption that they did in fact believe that the only way to protect their self interest was in fact rebellion, and in fact that all the other reasons were not just the reasons claimed, but actually lies formed to obfuscate the real reason.

Hannah-Jones' emphasis on slavery as a motivation is exaggerated and fair to criticize on that basis, but it would not be absurd to argue that her approach is no worse than other more traditional accounts that widely ignore the issue entirely or downplay it, and indeed may be a helpful foil to those views.

This is the crux of the argument, and I find that you are, like Oex, actually agreeing with me.

If acting like slavery didn't matter is a failure to understand and even an active attempt to obfuscae the truth, then turning around and demanding that slavery was the ONLY thing that mattered is definitionally at least as bad, and likely much worse (another word for that is absurd).

There is in fact a lot of complexity and nuance to all of this. Ignoring or downplaying one of many variables is obviously a mistake that needs to be fixed. But promoting the one variable downplayed or ignored to being the *only* or at least primary variable means that at the same time you must downplay or ignore not a single variable, but all of them but that one.

Like I said, that is absurd. And not at all necessary to foil those views - in fact, I think that making up things you know are not true is almos never "helpful" when your claim is to be interested in actual objective reality.