This is from Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites", which describes the shift of the US from a fundamentally local and middle-class society to an urban and cosmopolitan one. At the time it probably seemed prophetic. Now, it simply seems to describe the commonplace.
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If I were teaching this book to (say) Millennials or GenZ'ers now, I'd probably have to assign reading that somehow conveyed what the US was like before it was split into localist/globalist, mass-market/elitist, Flyover/Bicoastal halves.
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That, in fact, there *was* something other than our current, post-Reagan neoliberal reality at some point. To me it's poignant, as I'm old enough to remember hints of the world before (particularly given my very bourgeois Goldwater Republican parents)...
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...and then discovering what the world had really become when I entered the wider world, a nation of smug elites masquerading as meritocrats that had given up any notion of a Jeffersonian democracy. It was quite the shock. Not least of all, because I was decidedly *not* an elite.
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Oh, and since people will likely freak out at the positive use of 'nationalism', note that Lasch was writing in 1995, where that hadn't yet come to represent a completely negative thing ('jingoism' was more the word then). This is another big change between now and then.
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By 'nationalism' he meant a sense of common and unifying identity and purpose (even in the midst of the always pluralistic and motley American polity), not necessarily the overweening rah-rah jingoism of our Trumpian present, and all that darkly suggests for the future.
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"Ordinary Americans and their rulers are alienated now in ways unimaginable to the Northerners and Southerners who killed each other a century and a half ago, but who nodded when Abraham Lincoln noted that they “prayed to the same God.”"https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/ …
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Interesting. Lasch begins his tome with a similar rumination on how alienated modern-day elites are.
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as a bay area tech worker, if ww3 happens, i'd never get into the same foxhole as my fellow "elite" *IT graduate - they'll run back home 1st sign of trouble and turn me in as their ticket to safety
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Correct. Most of them would utterly fail the Red Dawn Test, as I call it. Who would I want in the foxhole? The dudes I see at the few Bay Area gun ranges operating. About half white working class, half Asian or Hispanic. Those are going to be the partisans in the Sierras.
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The very definition of a postmodern society is a never ending fragmentation into the abyss. A Conflictus perpetuum. Like a self-eating dystopian, antihuman, postliberal machine...

#Accelerationism#postliberalism#postcapitalismThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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“...one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Is the pledge of allegiance a nationalist ritual?
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