- There’s right-wing rejection of modern values in Europe, too;
- The end of American exceptionalism, which has been going on for some time;
- Who does Trump want to shoot with snipers on his Triumphal Arch?
- A study about children exposed to religion.
NY Times, news analysis by Steve Erlanger, today: The Fuel That Feeds Europe’s Far Right: Nostalgia and Lost Pride, subtitled “The populist emphasis on national identity and threats to it, real and imagined, finds a deep response in voters adrift in a world they no longer understand.”
The rise of a far-right party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, represents a skewing of history, fueled by its own, sometimes imaginary vision of the past. It feeds, analysts say, on widespread alienation from a liberal, multicultural, united Germany committed to the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes.
The AfD is now the most popular party nationwide, polls say, close to governing a German state for the first time, and did well again in two more state elections on Sunday. It has benefited from economic and industrial decline and a sense of insecurity, which the party blames on the extensive migration of young Muslims in the last decade.
… The AfD has thrived on a key element that ties most populist parties together, especially those of the far right: nostalgia for a society and nation lost to time, even if they exist only in gilded memory or fantasy.
… That sense of insecurity, analysts say, is driving many people to yearn for the narratives they do know, especially in the past, when life is remembered as simpler, family structures seemed more defined, and Western nations were largely Christian and less diverse.
Across Europe, far-right leaders have painted that idea of the past as preferable to the present, downplaying or dismissing inconvenient facts, such as Mussolini in Italy, collaboration with the Nazis, Soviet occupation or the inequalities of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
Going on with examples from France and the US. Vance, Rubio.
Clearly MAGA was triggered by Obama, but its regressive sentiments go back to Reagan, as recently discussed. My working theory about this rely on the bifurcation of human nature, between simplex and complex, between traditional and progressive, that goes back perhaps tens of thousands of years, at least since the agricultural revolution and the split between the hunter-gatherers and the farmers and herders, the second group gradually learning to think in new ways suitable for larger and larger groups and different living conditions.
But it’s also, I see more and more, a reaction against the pace of change in modern life. Things are happening too fast. Most people don’t have a clear view of long-term history, and how things have changed, but conservatives at least want life to be like what their parents had.
And this goes to the limitations of human cognition. Human nature evolved for stability. Basic human nature is uncomfortable with the pace of change in modern life.
Fortunately, there’s a wide range in human nature. We’re not all stuck in a tribal mentality. Humanity’s advances are due to discoveries made by that second group. Until the tribal group strikes back. As they seem to be doing.
The essay ends:
To a large extent, what is happening in Germany is an international phenomenon, noted John Kampfner, a British analyst of Germany, where he is also a citizen. “Each of these populist movements have their specificities but follow similar tramlines,” he said.
“A population that feels insecure,” he said, “that equates globalization and transnational identity with insecurity, is very open to this kind of identitarian politics from the nationalist conservative point of view.”
Is there a way to slow things down, to calm the nervous tribalists?
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On a somewhat smaller scale:
Don’t all nations think they’re exceptional in some way? America has had the chance to be truly exceptional on the world stage, but has gone back and forth about this, for 250 years.
NY Times, Charles A. Kupchan, yesterday: The End of American Exceptionalism?
America’s days as the exceptional nation seem to be over.
At home, President Donald Trump is weakening the foundations of representative government. In the rest of the world, he has set aside democracy promotion and seems more inclined to work with autocracies like China and Russia than with America’s traditional democratic allies.
Of course this isn’t news. America has been ceding its position as a world leader since Trump was first elected. This fits with the above item: there are lot of Americans who want to turn away from change and complexity and just stay home and be the same.
The writer is actually sympathetic with Trump’s strategy, to a degree.
While Mr. Trump’s assault on American democracy is both without precedent and dangerous, he is right to hold off on the promotion of democracy abroad and to reach across ideological dividing lines. Improving relations with China, as Mr. Trump will aim to do at his summit with its leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday, is a must in an interdependent world.
Not only is a pragmatic realism needed to navigate today’s fragmenting world, but it is in keeping with much of U.S. history. From the founding era until World War II, Americans tended to focus on their own affairs and let other peoples do the same.
It’s one thing to improve relations with other countries, and impose American ideals on them. And yet.
Yet Mr. Trump’s dismissal of democracy promotion is flawed and out of step with U.S. history in one critical respect: By compromising America’s own democracy, and backing illiberal populists in other democracies, he is extinguishing the nation’s founding mission to change the world by example. The version of exceptionalism that long guided the nation mandated pragmatism abroad so that Americans could focus on advancing their democratic experiment at home. The settlers of the New World were to build a “city upon a hill,” as the Puritan leader John Winthrop put it in 1630, ultimately changing the world, but only by serving as a democratic model that others would follow. This is the version of U.S. statecraft that urgently needs to be resuscitated.
And recalling Thomas Paine, as I just did a couple posts ago.
Americans embraced a democratic messianism from the get-go. As Thomas Paine put it in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Long piece; I’m sure I’m not doing it justice. But the arc of American history is captured in the final paragraph:
Americans must urgently rescue their democratic experiment. Their ability to do so is critical to reversing the illiberal tide that is rising globally. Only if Americans get their own democratic house in order and demonstrate that democracy can outperform autocracy will they be able to ensure the arc of history again bends toward more freedom.
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Question of the day.
NY Times, yesterday: Trump Says His Contested Arch Would House Drones and Snipers, subtitled “The president’s announcement on Sunday echoed his justification for the White House ballroom: that the project was necessary for national security.”
Why on Earth does Trump need snipers on his Triumphal Arch? To shoot who, exactly? Protesters when he tries to take office for a third term?
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Facebook: Religion: The good, the bad and the ugly’s Post
There’s no citation to cite, just a post from this Facebook groups, “Religion: The good, the bad and the ugly.” Noting it because it aligns with my more severe conclusion: that early religious inculcation undermines the ability to think. Not just to be confused between real and imaginary characters. To understand that conclusions must depend on evidence.
A 2014 study published in Cognitive Science found what many developmental psychologists have long suspected: children exposed to religion were significantly less able to distinguish between real and fantastical characters. When presented with stories, religious children identified religious figures as real, but also struggled to correctly identify fictional characters as fictional compared to their secular peers.
This is not about intelligence. It is about epistemology — how we teach children to know what is true.
