Thanks for bringing attention to the Whiskey Rebellion, which has always seemed to me a poor cousin of Shay’s Rebellion. So much rebelling under President Washington. It’s like, once you start rebelling it’s hard to stop.
You got a government to fund, no matter how minimal it is, and taxing the property of the rich is out of the question, you tend to fall back on excise taxes that hit working folks the hardest. Only took us a hundred years and a world war to figure out you could tax income, we're kinda slow learners on these things.
I'm no expert, just a dotard who's thought about this stuff. In no particular order.
If, as the cliche goes, journalism is the first draft of history, then it follows that the second draft is pretty lousy. It's not till revisionists or at least curious people into documented facts and stuff get to it that truths are revealed and all that.
I assume I'm on record here -- certainly am around the inter webs -- to let's say being really unimpressed by the Founders. I see them as photo-capitalist pigs who don't want London cramping their style as it were. For the Founders, freedom is a means to accumulate more wealth more freely. As for all that democracy stuff, well, given how limited it was -- that is, limited to an elite -- it was maybe less democracy and more oligarchy. For the rubes who may be impacted by a revolution and war, there was the easy enrichment of cheap land waiting to be taken from indigenous people. It wasn't til the Bill of Rights was forced into being that there were rights for the masses in any arguable way. (One of my ancient old fart theories going back to my youth is that we had the only stable revolution-birthed state because our revolution atypically was sooo middle class or bourgeois-led.)
So, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same and things always revert to the mean which is to say that we're an echo of that on which we're built is not all that surprising, at least to me.
That ranted, great review. Works as a precis of the book, which is to say no need to read it. (FWIW, I'm in the middle of one book and next history book is likely to be the Graeber book. But I read these things in bits an pieces or a year or more so.)
"For the Founders, freedom is a means to accumulate more wealth more freely." Yeah, the more history one reads, the harder it is to evade that conclusion.
And that mentality has persisted throughout American history, which explains why we're so far behind the rest of the industrialized world in areas like paid leave.
The little people got the freedom to steal land and own guns, the elite got the right to extract and to privatize the commons in excess of what they did in England.
Factor in also that, about a ten- or twelve-day boat ride down the Ohio River, you reached the Mississippi and you were in Spanish territory. The connection the Westerners had with the coastal elites was always tenuous. . .
Thanks for the suggestion, Roy. I still had one credit on Audible this month and was wondering what to get.
In other news, I volunteered as a clinic escort/counter-protester at Planned Parenthood in Overland Park Kansas Saturday. Details here, if anyone is interested. We could use your help.
Nah. Just hoping I can leave my granddaughters a world where they can get the damn things mailed to them like God intended.
There was one amusing interlude. Men weren't allowed in the building, so they had to wait in the parking lot while the patient went in. This one young man got back in his car moved to a space near the entrance where the circus was going on. He parked and headed toward the bible thumpers. He walked fast and with a purpose, and he was PISSED.
He wasn't tall, but he was muscular and well defined. 30s, perhaps. He wore his pants in that halfway down style that seems to trigger so many people, and he looked like he dared anybody to say something to him about it. He had short dreadlocks and looked like he'd have been more comfortable in Compton than Kansas.
He got right up in their faces. "You got somethin' to say to me, BITCH?!" and folks, I figured we were fixing to go at it right there. I took a tighter grip on the stout rattan cane I'd brought along "It's not a weapon, Officer, it's a medical appliance that helps me walk" because if the brother required backup, I would back his young ass up. I might be old but I'm not completely useless and I know a trick or two. I could at least make sure anyone jumping him from behind came through me to do it.
He sure didn't appear to need any help from me, though, and after screaming insults at the cowering bible thumpers for a bit, violence was averted and he headed back to his car.
My sister spoke to him afterwards, though she had to approach carefully because at first he thought she was with the whackos. The decision to abort was particularly grueling for he and his girlfriend, who had NOT appreciated strangers yelling at her on such an unhappy day.
Like me, he'd had no idea this was happening.
I'm sorry for his and his girlfriend's trauma, but he made this old man feel more alive than I've felt in years. The looks on those bible-thumpers' faces as their worst nightmare stomped angrily towards them was priceless. It was just a shame the show couldn't be staged someplace with less chance of disturbing the patients.
Anyway, I can't believe this bullshit is allowed to go on in a supposedly advanced country. Get involved. DO something. Especially if you're male. This is our mess and we need to step up and clean it up and take out the sort of trash that would harass a woman seeing her doctor.
The fervor & vehemence of the chuds (but not only the chuds) in insisting that the early history of the USA is not relevant to what degree of "progress" we believe we've achieved, pretty much ensures that there is the exact right place to understand our penchant for Xtn nationalist yt supremacist violence. Americans have been tying bizarre nostalgic appropriations of Biblical & medieval culture into every myth of nationhood.
The people should have resisted the corrupt, capitalist drives of the Founding Fathers, of course -- but the only language available was Puritan prophecy based in their understanding of the Old Testament & founded in anti-Indigenous violence. Those myths kept them from seeking solidarity with the Indignenous & Black Americans against the real oppressors.
Fair play, but can we at least put a couple " " around the word "supremacy" in the context? (I know, you typed "supremacist", which is more than simply a derivative – I'm just triggered by the whole concept, is all.)
"Supremacist" is the proper term in this context, grammatically & ideologically. Here, I think quotes have the effect of saying "some might say but let's not get hasty."
Sooooo, I guess I would need to hear a bit more about your objection here
Not questioning the usage in your post, just tweaked that the term white supremacy still gets tossed about without the requisite " "s. 'Cause after all these years surely we can agree that the concept is without merit...
The term is not nor has ever been an endorsement, but a plain-face description of the ideology. Sort of like "TERF" right?
Also, WS has the advantage of implicating supremacist ideas & practices beyond jackbooted skinheads, which are far more pervasive & far more dangerous.
I tend to worry more about killing off the yt supremacist inside myself than punctuation protocols, but that's just me...
Hmmm... I dunno about the proto, tbh... Pretty much the structures of profit extraction were place by the time the Western empires were wringing out their colonies. The credit & banking structures were more or less well in order by 1300. And the dependence of the US on captive labor doesn't disqualify. Yeah, the classic image is factories & machine labor
Marx has a pretty narrow view of what capitalism was, because it was embedded in his idea of "historical materialism" -- a widely refuted idea because it depends on faulty periodizations and a basically supersessionist, apocalyptic finale.
“Proto” was a lazy hedge because I don’t know how the development of capitalism tracks with the founding of this nation. Of course I know finance, lending, etc., goes back a couple of thousand years; parasitism not so much.
What if right-wingers had even one example to follow that wasn't violent revolution and 1776? Over here on the left, we can point to the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. whenever we need inspiration and a practical guide to how to get what we want. Nonviolent social change isn't pie-in-the-sky to us - we've done it, repeatedly, and we're doing it right now with BLM.
But over on the right? Where can you look as a guide to your own actions, or as a source of inspiration for a crowd you're trying to whip up? It's all 1776, all the time and... oh, wait, I forgot how they can also draw inspiration from the South's decision to start a bloody war over their sacred right to own other people as property. Never mind.
This may be because right-wingers don't participate in movements whose aim is to improve the lives of actual human beings, other than themselves that is. It's why I think it's way past time for liberals and Democrats to take back the word "patriot". True patriots love their country. These right-wing insurrectionist douchebags don't love anything about this country but themselves -- their own beliefs, reality, wants, needs, etc. -- and they are just fine if others have to suffer for their benefit. They despise democracy, equality, and freedom for anyone else, and their hatred for other Americans seems to boundless. That's why their mythos is violence, which they revere.
Right. They're opposed to social change. The Revolution itself is kind of a stretch in that sense, because would have been Tories themselves in 1776, anxious to maintain authority, which is why their views on the Revolution are so helplessly stupid and incoherent--just bellowing "Liberty!"
The whole point we've seen both from the Confederate statues through the 1619 imbroglio to the manufactured CRT crisis is, when they say "Don't erase our history!" they mean "Please let us erase our history!" The effort is aimed at forgetting everything.
True that they'd be the Tories, worship of whoever seems to be on top at the moment is an essential part of the authoritarian mindset.
But I still have trouble sorting out cause and effect here. They love guns because of 1776, when guns proved useful in winning us some liberty? Or the love 1776 because it's a time when guns proved useful and they love guns? It's confused, not least in the minds of the people who believe this shit.
Well,.conservatism is what they call in solfeggio a moveable do (a deer, a female deer), where what's being preserved is the status quo Now. Whatever torture must be done to history to prove this is the best of all possible worlds Now is a small price to pay.
I'd say it depends: sometimes it's {Now - 20yrs},in Karl Rove and other business pseudo-libertarians' minds it was explicitly 1895.
As for guns, I'd say it's love for the imagined frontier crossed with inherited resentment of being a peasant not allowed to wear a sword crossed with the entirely accurate knowledge that those Indians mostly didn't kill _themselves_ (inflected by ingratitude toward the Federal government who mostly did)…and, of course, race-paranoia, hence the N.R.A.'s not standing-up for the rights of black men killed for wielding dangerous toys and cellular telephones.
But libertarians aren't comservatives, in either the "classical" definition or the contemporary/insane one. Libertarians are focused on overthrowing the tyranny of Regulation, not preserving existing power hierarchy. They assume they will come out (or stay) on top after destruction of the bureaucratic State, due to their inherent superiority, but it's different motivations and goals than a dentist with a boat, or a guy who owns a few car dealerships, or a rancher who resents paying the government to graze his cattle on public land. They resent regulation being applied to them, not the concept of regulation.
Most of what Americans know and believe about American history is really American Mythology, deliberately designed and taught to flatter and unite citizens of this sprawling Eden into a Great Nation. It worked a treat as long as the federal government kept pumping money and support to the settlers of the wilderness, asking little in return except blind loyalty. Once the frontier was declared Closed, it was just a matter of time until cracks started appearing in the foundation.
True enough, but Actual Conservatives have adopted a lot of libertarian schtick. Sometimes they try to square that circle by claiming that they're in fact being Constitutional Traditionalists because The Founders were libertarians: all you need to do for that is to not really know much about the Founders, and they're good at that.
I understand the point about libertarians, but I don't believe it any more. It's merely a matter of emphasis. They're libertarians when they're thinking about what they want for themselves, and authoritarians when they're thinking about what they want for the Other they're afraid of. A libertarian is a conservative who just tries not to talk about the other side. Megan McArdle doesn't suggest defunding the police, but she finds it "awkward" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/23/yes-more-policing-burdens-disadvantaged-communities-it-benefits-them-too/.
Read a review and a piece of the Graeber book so I’m pondering why people skew towards being submissive as opposed to being accommodating. Being submissive is more a conservative thing than a liberal thing so maybe your answer’s there.
I'm pretty sure the women covered in "Mothers of Massive Resistance" weren't violent, but maybe they figured the Klan and more informally organised Upstanding Citizens had that covered.
They’re maybe sort of losing the gains of a conservative revolution. Actually, in a sense 1776 wasn’t a revolutionary war but a civil war between elites, notwithstanding that a civil war like that would be per se revolutionary maybe.
Hogeland's a wonderful writer just in the sense of being exciting to read whatever the subject matter, and a wonderful corrective to the "consensus view" arising after World War II that we all absorbed in those history classes, in which the Revolution and founding of the U.S. were blindingly clear examples of the Light of Progress; I ran across him in January in an essay on that that touched on the 1619 Project and showed how dishonest much of the criticism against Nikole Hannah-Jones was. http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2021/01/lectiones-american-historiography.html, but his books on the Declaration of Independence (Declaration), on the US invasion of the Ohio Valley tribal areas in the 1790s (Autumn of the Black Snake), and Founding Finance are also must-reads.
I live exactly 1 mile from the " Battle of Piqua " monument. Grew up 25 miles from there. We learned about Tecumseh and Blue Jacket in elementary school .Each had an outdoor drama based on their life performed every summerat a venue built just for the show. I think the Blue Jacket drama closed several years back. In the 7th grade we read the Alan Eckert books- The Frontiersman, Wilderness Empire and Blue Jacket. Pretty stern stuff for Junior High. I remember reading Blood Meridian a dozen years later thinking it reminded me a lot of the Eckert books. Scalp hunting turns out to be a great metaphor for big chunks of the American Story.Anyway- Hogeland has real gift for narrative. Being drawn into a learning experience by it is a treat.
Seconding "Autumn of the Black Snake." How he retells Washington's explosion when he learns of Arthur St. Clair's defeat at the Wabash is *everything.*
Thanks for the great review. I listened to an interview with Woody Holton, a historian who specializes in the American Revolution era that was so similarly fascinating it made me want to read his book. Hamilton, as he does seemingly everywhere except the musical, comes off exactly as a "mean political prick" that you describe.
Holton: "Alexander Hamilton, what he said in his speech to the Constitutional Convention, the main problem that we’ve got to fix, we can’t leave Philadelphia until we figure out how to solve this problem. The problem — and I’ll quote him — is “excess of democracy."
For anyone interested who hasn't heard it, the podcast is here (also a transcript).
Can I just take a moment to say "Fuck Lin-Manuel Miranda"? Yeah, cos fuck him for that shallow historical revisionist mess concealing the same old nationalist mythology, designed to make "sugar pill liberals" cozy & snug. Also, he has an awful voice for rap.
Hogeland is a great writer and researcher. History doesn't repeat but it rhymes, at that wag Mark Twain said. Autumn of the Black Snake is also an eye-opener. It's Hogeland's look at the formation of a U.S. standing army and an exploration of an even more obscure slice of founding history (at least to me): the Ohio Valley wars. Washington had his fingers all over that too. Blue Jacket, Little Turtle, and "Mad" Anthony Wayne (a bit of a misnomer, according to Hogeland) all have leading roles.
LOL - I'll tell the boys down in the holler running their pot still to be glad they ain't payin' the revenuers for all that apple brandy they're making.
I'm already very familiar with the story but as you point out it does reveal a lot about the early attitudes and motivations of our so called "founding fathers".
Good find, Roy. The early days of the Great Experiment were studiously avoided in my education. I recall the Whiskey Rebellion presented as some ungrateful alcoholics who didn't want to pay their fair share. This was Catholic school, so understandable. I don't think enough people understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, even today. With Michael Flynn running hard to be adopted by Trump calling for the establishment of a state religion, and being cheered, it won't take much to sand it down.
That is still better than how today's Republicans would see it -- heroic real Americans fighting the taxman and attacking the Feds -- James McFarlane and Daniel Bradford would have been at the peaceful, anti-fed protest on 1-6 were they alive.
This is excellent -Thank you!
I must say , I've often thought of Ammon Bundy as the " Robespierre of the West.”
Fascinating, Roy -- thanks!
Ditto!
Thanks for bringing attention to the Whiskey Rebellion, which has always seemed to me a poor cousin of Shay’s Rebellion. So much rebelling under President Washington. It’s like, once you start rebelling it’s hard to stop.
I get Shay’s and the Whiskey confused.
You got a government to fund, no matter how minimal it is, and taxing the property of the rich is out of the question, you tend to fall back on excise taxes that hit working folks the hardest. Only took us a hundred years and a world war to figure out you could tax income, we're kinda slow learners on these things.
I'm no expert, just a dotard who's thought about this stuff. In no particular order.
If, as the cliche goes, journalism is the first draft of history, then it follows that the second draft is pretty lousy. It's not till revisionists or at least curious people into documented facts and stuff get to it that truths are revealed and all that.
I assume I'm on record here -- certainly am around the inter webs -- to let's say being really unimpressed by the Founders. I see them as photo-capitalist pigs who don't want London cramping their style as it were. For the Founders, freedom is a means to accumulate more wealth more freely. As for all that democracy stuff, well, given how limited it was -- that is, limited to an elite -- it was maybe less democracy and more oligarchy. For the rubes who may be impacted by a revolution and war, there was the easy enrichment of cheap land waiting to be taken from indigenous people. It wasn't til the Bill of Rights was forced into being that there were rights for the masses in any arguable way. (One of my ancient old fart theories going back to my youth is that we had the only stable revolution-birthed state because our revolution atypically was sooo middle class or bourgeois-led.)
So, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same and things always revert to the mean which is to say that we're an echo of that on which we're built is not all that surprising, at least to me.
That ranted, great review. Works as a precis of the book, which is to say no need to read it. (FWIW, I'm in the middle of one book and next history book is likely to be the Graeber book. But I read these things in bits an pieces or a year or more so.)
"For the Founders, freedom is a means to accumulate more wealth more freely." Yeah, the more history one reads, the harder it is to evade that conclusion.
And that mentality has persisted throughout American history, which explains why we're so far behind the rest of the industrialized world in areas like paid leave.
The little people got the freedom to steal land and own guns, the elite got the right to extract and to privatize the commons in excess of what they did in England.
Maestro, you just wrote a positive review of a book saying about as much 8o
Factor in also that, about a ten- or twelve-day boat ride down the Ohio River, you reached the Mississippi and you were in Spanish territory. The connection the Westerners had with the coastal elites was always tenuous. . .
Thanks for the suggestion, Roy. I still had one credit on Audible this month and was wondering what to get.
In other news, I volunteered as a clinic escort/counter-protester at Planned Parenthood in Overland Park Kansas Saturday. Details here, if anyone is interested. We could use your help.
https://twitter.com/JoeMommaSan/status/1460055949029355522?s=20
You're a hero, Mommadillo!
Nah. Just hoping I can leave my granddaughters a world where they can get the damn things mailed to them like God intended.
There was one amusing interlude. Men weren't allowed in the building, so they had to wait in the parking lot while the patient went in. This one young man got back in his car moved to a space near the entrance where the circus was going on. He parked and headed toward the bible thumpers. He walked fast and with a purpose, and he was PISSED.
He wasn't tall, but he was muscular and well defined. 30s, perhaps. He wore his pants in that halfway down style that seems to trigger so many people, and he looked like he dared anybody to say something to him about it. He had short dreadlocks and looked like he'd have been more comfortable in Compton than Kansas.
He got right up in their faces. "You got somethin' to say to me, BITCH?!" and folks, I figured we were fixing to go at it right there. I took a tighter grip on the stout rattan cane I'd brought along "It's not a weapon, Officer, it's a medical appliance that helps me walk" because if the brother required backup, I would back his young ass up. I might be old but I'm not completely useless and I know a trick or two. I could at least make sure anyone jumping him from behind came through me to do it.
He sure didn't appear to need any help from me, though, and after screaming insults at the cowering bible thumpers for a bit, violence was averted and he headed back to his car.
My sister spoke to him afterwards, though she had to approach carefully because at first he thought she was with the whackos. The decision to abort was particularly grueling for he and his girlfriend, who had NOT appreciated strangers yelling at her on such an unhappy day.
Like me, he'd had no idea this was happening.
I'm sorry for his and his girlfriend's trauma, but he made this old man feel more alive than I've felt in years. The looks on those bible-thumpers' faces as their worst nightmare stomped angrily towards them was priceless. It was just a shame the show couldn't be staged someplace with less chance of disturbing the patients.
Anyway, I can't believe this bullshit is allowed to go on in a supposedly advanced country. Get involved. DO something. Especially if you're male. This is our mess and we need to step up and clean it up and take out the sort of trash that would harass a woman seeing her doctor.
LOL! We’re no advanced country. The response to Covid should have proven that if too many other things didn’t previously.
Good for you, Mom!!
The fervor & vehemence of the chuds (but not only the chuds) in insisting that the early history of the USA is not relevant to what degree of "progress" we believe we've achieved, pretty much ensures that there is the exact right place to understand our penchant for Xtn nationalist yt supremacist violence. Americans have been tying bizarre nostalgic appropriations of Biblical & medieval culture into every myth of nationhood.
The people should have resisted the corrupt, capitalist drives of the Founding Fathers, of course -- but the only language available was Puritan prophecy based in their understanding of the Old Testament & founded in anti-Indigenous violence. Those myths kept them from seeking solidarity with the Indignenous & Black Americans against the real oppressors.
In other words, "whiteness" was working just as it was designed to do...
Fair play, but can we at least put a couple " " around the word "supremacy" in the context? (I know, you typed "supremacist", which is more than simply a derivative – I'm just triggered by the whole concept, is all.)
"Supremacist" is the proper term in this context, grammatically & ideologically. Here, I think quotes have the effect of saying "some might say but let's not get hasty."
Sooooo, I guess I would need to hear a bit more about your objection here
Not questioning the usage in your post, just tweaked that the term white supremacy still gets tossed about without the requisite " "s. 'Cause after all these years surely we can agree that the concept is without merit...
The term is not nor has ever been an endorsement, but a plain-face description of the ideology. Sort of like "TERF" right?
Also, WS has the advantage of implicating supremacist ideas & practices beyond jackbooted skinheads, which are far more pervasive & far more dangerous.
I tend to worry more about killing off the yt supremacist inside myself than punctuation protocols, but that's just me...
Ya got me there, pal...
It's all good -- we can all come at the same goal by different routes, so long as we get there. And I'm always happy to explain myself if needed
I do believe the Founders were more proto-capitalists since capitalism was still developing at the time.
Hmmm... I dunno about the proto, tbh... Pretty much the structures of profit extraction were place by the time the Western empires were wringing out their colonies. The credit & banking structures were more or less well in order by 1300. And the dependence of the US on captive labor doesn't disqualify. Yeah, the classic image is factories & machine labor
Marx has a pretty narrow view of what capitalism was, because it was embedded in his idea of "historical materialism" -- a widely refuted idea because it depends on faulty periodizations and a basically supersessionist, apocalyptic finale.
“Proto” was a lazy hedge because I don’t know how the development of capitalism tracks with the founding of this nation. Of course I know finance, lending, etc., goes back a couple of thousand years; parasitism not so much.
What if right-wingers had even one example to follow that wasn't violent revolution and 1776? Over here on the left, we can point to the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. whenever we need inspiration and a practical guide to how to get what we want. Nonviolent social change isn't pie-in-the-sky to us - we've done it, repeatedly, and we're doing it right now with BLM.
But over on the right? Where can you look as a guide to your own actions, or as a source of inspiration for a crowd you're trying to whip up? It's all 1776, all the time and... oh, wait, I forgot how they can also draw inspiration from the South's decision to start a bloody war over their sacred right to own other people as property. Never mind.
This may be because right-wingers don't participate in movements whose aim is to improve the lives of actual human beings, other than themselves that is. It's why I think it's way past time for liberals and Democrats to take back the word "patriot". True patriots love their country. These right-wing insurrectionist douchebags don't love anything about this country but themselves -- their own beliefs, reality, wants, needs, etc. -- and they are just fine if others have to suffer for their benefit. They despise democracy, equality, and freedom for anyone else, and their hatred for other Americans seems to boundless. That's why their mythos is violence, which they revere.
Right. They're opposed to social change. The Revolution itself is kind of a stretch in that sense, because would have been Tories themselves in 1776, anxious to maintain authority, which is why their views on the Revolution are so helplessly stupid and incoherent--just bellowing "Liberty!"
The whole point we've seen both from the Confederate statues through the 1619 imbroglio to the manufactured CRT crisis is, when they say "Don't erase our history!" they mean "Please let us erase our history!" The effort is aimed at forgetting everything.
True that they'd be the Tories, worship of whoever seems to be on top at the moment is an essential part of the authoritarian mindset.
But I still have trouble sorting out cause and effect here. They love guns because of 1776, when guns proved useful in winning us some liberty? Or the love 1776 because it's a time when guns proved useful and they love guns? It's confused, not least in the minds of the people who believe this shit.
Well,.conservatism is what they call in solfeggio a moveable do (a deer, a female deer), where what's being preserved is the status quo Now. Whatever torture must be done to history to prove this is the best of all possible worlds Now is a small price to pay.
I'd say it depends: sometimes it's {Now - 20yrs},in Karl Rove and other business pseudo-libertarians' minds it was explicitly 1895.
As for guns, I'd say it's love for the imagined frontier crossed with inherited resentment of being a peasant not allowed to wear a sword crossed with the entirely accurate knowledge that those Indians mostly didn't kill _themselves_ (inflected by ingratitude toward the Federal government who mostly did)…and, of course, race-paranoia, hence the N.R.A.'s not standing-up for the rights of black men killed for wielding dangerous toys and cellular telephones.
But libertarians aren't comservatives, in either the "classical" definition or the contemporary/insane one. Libertarians are focused on overthrowing the tyranny of Regulation, not preserving existing power hierarchy. They assume they will come out (or stay) on top after destruction of the bureaucratic State, due to their inherent superiority, but it's different motivations and goals than a dentist with a boat, or a guy who owns a few car dealerships, or a rancher who resents paying the government to graze his cattle on public land. They resent regulation being applied to them, not the concept of regulation.
Most of what Americans know and believe about American history is really American Mythology, deliberately designed and taught to flatter and unite citizens of this sprawling Eden into a Great Nation. It worked a treat as long as the federal government kept pumping money and support to the settlers of the wilderness, asking little in return except blind loyalty. Once the frontier was declared Closed, it was just a matter of time until cracks started appearing in the foundation.
True enough, but Actual Conservatives have adopted a lot of libertarian schtick. Sometimes they try to square that circle by claiming that they're in fact being Constitutional Traditionalists because The Founders were libertarians: all you need to do for that is to not really know much about the Founders, and they're good at that.
I understand the point about libertarians, but I don't believe it any more. It's merely a matter of emphasis. They're libertarians when they're thinking about what they want for themselves, and authoritarians when they're thinking about what they want for the Other they're afraid of. A libertarian is a conservative who just tries not to talk about the other side. Megan McArdle doesn't suggest defunding the police, but she finds it "awkward" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/23/yes-more-policing-burdens-disadvantaged-communities-it-benefits-them-too/.
So it's whatever key we're playing in, but its relationship to the other pitches in the scale is always the same
The Founders over a freedom to get rich quick and easy. That was enough freedom for the little people.
Read a review and a piece of the Graeber book so I’m pondering why people skew towards being submissive as opposed to being accommodating. Being submissive is more a conservative thing than a liberal thing so maybe your answer’s there.
This is a fresh point, to me.
I'm pretty sure the women covered in "Mothers of Massive Resistance" weren't violent, but maybe they figured the Klan and more informally organised Upstanding Citizens had that covered.
They’re maybe sort of losing the gains of a conservative revolution. Actually, in a sense 1776 wasn’t a revolutionary war but a civil war between elites, notwithstanding that a civil war like that would be per se revolutionary maybe.
Hogeland's a wonderful writer just in the sense of being exciting to read whatever the subject matter, and a wonderful corrective to the "consensus view" arising after World War II that we all absorbed in those history classes, in which the Revolution and founding of the U.S. were blindingly clear examples of the Light of Progress; I ran across him in January in an essay on that that touched on the 1619 Project and showed how dishonest much of the criticism against Nikole Hannah-Jones was. http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2021/01/lectiones-american-historiography.html, but his books on the Declaration of Independence (Declaration), on the US invasion of the Ohio Valley tribal areas in the 1790s (Autumn of the Black Snake), and Founding Finance are also must-reads.
"Autumn of the Black Snake" is terrific.
I live exactly 1 mile from the " Battle of Piqua " monument. Grew up 25 miles from there. We learned about Tecumseh and Blue Jacket in elementary school .Each had an outdoor drama based on their life performed every summerat a venue built just for the show. I think the Blue Jacket drama closed several years back. In the 7th grade we read the Alan Eckert books- The Frontiersman, Wilderness Empire and Blue Jacket. Pretty stern stuff for Junior High. I remember reading Blood Meridian a dozen years later thinking it reminded me a lot of the Eckert books. Scalp hunting turns out to be a great metaphor for big chunks of the American Story.Anyway- Hogeland has real gift for narrative. Being drawn into a learning experience by it is a treat.
Seconding "Autumn of the Black Snake." How he retells Washington's explosion when he learns of Arthur St. Clair's defeat at the Wabash is *everything.*
"I remember reading Blood Meridian a dozen years later thinking it reminded me a lot of the Eckert books." Holy shit.
Thanks for the great review. I listened to an interview with Woody Holton, a historian who specializes in the American Revolution era that was so similarly fascinating it made me want to read his book. Hamilton, as he does seemingly everywhere except the musical, comes off exactly as a "mean political prick" that you describe.
Holton: "Alexander Hamilton, what he said in his speech to the Constitutional Convention, the main problem that we’ve got to fix, we can’t leave Philadelphia until we figure out how to solve this problem. The problem — and I’ll quote him — is “excess of democracy."
For anyone interested who hasn't heard it, the podcast is here (also a transcript).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-woody-holton.html?searchResultPosition=1
Can I just take a moment to say "Fuck Lin-Manuel Miranda"? Yeah, cos fuck him for that shallow historical revisionist mess concealing the same old nationalist mythology, designed to make "sugar pill liberals" cozy & snug. Also, he has an awful voice for rap.
Hogeland is a great writer and researcher. History doesn't repeat but it rhymes, at that wag Mark Twain said. Autumn of the Black Snake is also an eye-opener. It's Hogeland's look at the formation of a U.S. standing army and an exploration of an even more obscure slice of founding history (at least to me): the Ohio Valley wars. Washington had his fingers all over that too. Blue Jacket, Little Turtle, and "Mad" Anthony Wayne (a bit of a misnomer, according to Hogeland) all have leading roles.
LOL - I'll tell the boys down in the holler running their pot still to be glad they ain't payin' the revenuers for all that apple brandy they're making.
I'm already very familiar with the story but as you point out it does reveal a lot about the early attitudes and motivations of our so called "founding fathers".
Good find, Roy. The early days of the Great Experiment were studiously avoided in my education. I recall the Whiskey Rebellion presented as some ungrateful alcoholics who didn't want to pay their fair share. This was Catholic school, so understandable. I don't think enough people understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, even today. With Michael Flynn running hard to be adopted by Trump calling for the establishment of a state religion, and being cheered, it won't take much to sand it down.
That is still better than how today's Republicans would see it -- heroic real Americans fighting the taxman and attacking the Feds -- James McFarlane and Daniel Bradford would have been at the peaceful, anti-fed protest on 1-6 were they alive.
WC Fields on the Whiskey Rebellion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TJ6Dnfm1Jk
I felt like the only person in North America who’d read that book!
Definitely worthwhile.