"Whatever its faults, middle-class nationalism provided a common ground, common standards, a common frame of reference, without which society dissolves into nothing more than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers of America understood so well—a war of all against all."
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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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Replying to @antoniogm
But there are two different trends at work here. One is the shift from the Fordist economy (scattered) to the Entrepreneurial Age (clustered). The other is the rise of Toryism in America
. Not sure if both trends are correlated.pic.twitter.com/eydKj8y45c
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I buy the breakdown. Interesting.
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