Quarter of Americans sympathize with South in Civil War

By Dan Brooks in American History 3 Comments

Our ancestors did not have public opinion polls and therefore knew what their fellow Americans thought only through conjecture. If the country was building railroads and allowing the Irish to consume rock candy, people seemed happy. If they were arming themselves and claiming sovereign authority against the US Constitution, they were pissed. The past was a terrifying time, but it was made more palatable by the fallibility of any given assessment. Sure, back in 1861 it seemed like A) thousands of Americans were willing to die so that other Americans could own a third group of Americans as slaves, and B) everyone was therefore retarded, but maybe it was states’ rights or tariffs or something less awful. Now, of course, we enjoy no such comfort. Telephones and computers and Wharton graduates have allowed us to peer into the opinions of our fellow citizens with chilling comprehensiveness, and the chilling comprehension that results is, yeah, other people are dumb. Super dumb, as suggested by this CNN poll in which one in four Americans expresses sympathy for the Confederacy over the Union in the Civil War. Of course, they might just be contrary dicks. You can guess which sort of person I like better.

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Stronger than reason: David Brooks on the Tea Party

By Dan Brooks in counterculture, michael steele, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, specious trends, Tea Party, widespread dumbening 13 Comments

Dear god, please let there be a punk rock branch of the Tea Party.

He’s been wrong before, but when David Brooks says you’re a nationwide movement, you’re either Soccer Moms in the 2004 general election or a real thing. In Monday’s New York Times, Brooks alleges that the Tea Party movement is the latter. After opening with his usual overview of the prevailing sociopolitical winds for the last thirty to 100 years, he gets to the money shot. “Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year,” he writes. For the moment, Brooks has declined to enumerate which instruments he uses to measure the popularity of ideas, but he at least sounds right. “The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise,” he says. “The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.” Those committed to responsible argument will object to Brooks’s questionable use of the word so, which makes his theory the cause of his evidence, but as and statements his list still draws an unsettling connection. When Brooks points out that the Tea Partiers are defined by what they are against, and that most of what they are against can be grouped under “the concentrated power of the educated class,” he introduces a framework as useful as it is terrifying.

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Gaywad who won’t say Pledge a nerd hero

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 10 Comments
They look cute now, but as soon as those little hands come off their hearts, they go upside Will Phillips's head.

They look cute now, but as soon as those little hands come off their hearts, they go upside Will Phillips's head.

As an adult nerd, I am peculiarly fascinated by Will Phillips, the Arkansas ten year-old who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance until gay people are allowed to marry. If you haven’t seen the CNN interview he did with John Roberts, quit your job, tell your loved ones to go to hell and watch it now. Will Phillips is a very principled young man, who is possibly the puppet of his enormous father but unquestionably very brave. He is also a big-time nerd. Specifically, he is a nerd subspecies I refer to as the Careful Nerd—an articulate person whose intense awareness of himself has terrified him into a state of eerie calm, as if he were perpetually speaking from the top step of a ladder. The Careful Nerd makes up for his inability to confidently navigate nonverbal social cues by investing in the denotative meaning of language. Hence his vaguely Spock-y demeanor—he’s put his faith in the logical value of what he’s saying to get through the conversation, and organized the rest of his communication around not fucking up. I base all of this one accepted psychological study, by the way, and certainly not on my own personal experience.

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