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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Richard Florida points way to permanent conservative majority

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 2 Comments

Say what you will about the Tea Party; they are all wearing ball caps and sunglasses. Also they participate in a rhetoric of violence.

 

As part of his ongoing research into how much mileage you can get out of one sociological theory, Richard Florida has produced this terrifying examination of statistical conservatism in the United States. Props to “Mirko” Mike Sebba for the link. If you’re excited to see which states are more conservative than others, I urge you to close your eyes and visualize them right now, because you will be exactly right. Mississippi is the only state where more than 50% of respondents in a Gallup poll identified as conservatives, with a gang of mini-ssippis—North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and South Carolina, where nobody really followed up on why this happened—close behind. Does that list seem familiar to you? That’s right: they’re the suck states.

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Symbolic: GOP returns styrofoam to House cafeteria

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments

A cup I drank out of in 1983

American conservatism has always placed a high premium on the past, but it was not until its victories in the last election that the Republican party made good on its promise to actually reverse the flow of time. In the spirit of fiscal responsibility fuck you, the GOP has reintroduced Styrofoam to the House cafeteria. In theory, this measure will save the American taxpayer half a million dollars per year.* That it also undoes one of Nancy Pelosi’s pet projects and magically transports all diners to the year Back To the Future came out is just a fun bonus. The more you think about it, the more the switch back to Styrofoam is an incredibly versatile signifier. I submit that the Styrofoam cup is the best symbol yet for the Republican party: it’s white, it seemed like a great idea in the eighties, it’s made of oil, and even though you’re done with it, it’s going to be around for 500 years.

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Trying to make sense out of Jared Lee Loughner

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

By now you may have heard about Jared Lee Loughner, the Arizona man accused of shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people at a meet-your-congressperson even in Tuscon Saturday. Besides a slough of community college professors only too eager to talk about how weird he was in class, not much is known about Loughner. Or rather, a ton is known about Jared Lee Loughner, but it doesn’t really fit together. For example, he made this YouTube video. It’s constructed around formal syllogisms in which meaning flickers like those things you see on the periphery of your vision when you’re really tired, but it makes no sense at all. There are references to the Gold Standard and the Constitution, but there are also references to “conscience dreaming” and the US government trying to control the structure of English grammar. It doesn’t really hold together as an ideology, because Jared Loughner is a crazy person. That’s bad news for the people trying to triangulate his actions within contemporary American politics, and there are a lot of them. In the aftermath of his senseless attack, both halves of our fractured national discourse are scrambling to make Jared Loughner a charactering in some narrative they’ve been condemning all along.

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Greene loses!

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment

Democratic Senate hopeful Alvin Greene suffered a heartbreaking upset yesterday in South Carolina, losing to Republican Jim DeMint by the narrowest of 34-point margins. Across the country—as one New York Times writer described it, the “wide battleground that stretched from Alaska to Maine,” which I think means Canada—Greene’s surprise loss prefigured Republican gains, including a 60-seat pickup in the House of Representatives. “We’ve come to take our government back,” newly-elected Senator Rand Paul told his victory party. “They say that the U.S. Senate is the world’s most deliberative body. I’m going to ask them to deliberate on this: The American people are unhappy with what’s going on in Washington.” Mr. Paul then shouted an obscenity after an aide told him where the Senate is located.

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