I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong. What they are, and they don’t realize it, is an anachronism. They’re fighting a 1960s battle in a world run by twenty-first-century crooks. They’ve been encouraged to launch costly new offensives in already-lost cultural wars, and against a big-government hegemony of a kind that in reality hasn’t existed— or perhaps better to say, hasn’t really mattered— for decades. In the meantime an advanced new symbiosis of government and private bubble-economy interests goes undetected as it grows to exponential size and robs them blind.
From Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (pp. 16-17).
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- A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity -- Series
The rise and fall of the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary followed by the rise and fall of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. - Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability
Is national identity something that can be defined by an imagined future rather than by an imagined past? - Civilization and Its Discontents
Is it possible to overcome the alienation that comes inevitably with civilization? - Fear of the Future
There is so much to which we must say NO. To what can we say that will be worthy or our YES? - Originality vs. Novelty
What it means to be truly original. - The Coming Discontinuity
The machines win unless... - The Meaning of History in 25 Theses
The big picture succinctly summarized. - Reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age
Long, four part piece that seeks to summarize main themes of Taylor's important 2007 book. - Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism
In the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs - Subjects and Objects
Descartes articulated the fundamental problem of modern alienation. How do we get past it? - Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves
Meditation on Steinbeck's 'East of Eden' - Dying Traditions
Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific.
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