Soriek
1yr ago
If the National Coalition decides to work together with the Social Democrats, do you know how they will square their economic differences?
If NC works with the Finns Party do they get a green light on economic neoliberalism or are the FP populists on economic issues as well as social issues?
Soriek
1yr ago
Thanks, and interesting - I've had pretty similarish experiences both of long car commutes (though not that bad) and chaotic transit commutes and ultimately I still preferred the latter. Part of it is probably going to be personal preference but that constant boredum-plus-hypervigilance as you put it just drove me crazy. At the end of a long day of work I can at least read Wikipedia or whatever on the subway.
I agree completely that something needs to be done about criminals and crazy people on trains and buses. Part of my support for transit is that I think it's actually pretty easy to address those things. We have all the tools - stricter entrance/exit security plus law enforcement onboard - we just lack political will. This might still sound like a tall order, but still seems actually solvable in a way that the unpleasant part of driving just don't.
Soriek
1yr ago
Sure, but most transit advocates don't actually want trains to replace cars, they just don't want cars to replace trains (in the areas trains are viable, AKA cities)
It’s the same reason that people like Eisenhower refused to prop up the British or French empires after WW2, because they genuinely believed that America, as a former colony itself, must be on the “anti colonial” side.
Sometimes the west does stuff for ideological reasons, though just as or more often because of realpolitik. To pettily focus on just one part of your post, having just read his biography, Eisenhower (and the mid-century foreign policy blob in general) really didn't side against Britain and France in Suez for ideological reasons, but rather because:
1: He didn't want to lose undecided countries to become Soviet allies following the terrible PR of the invasion getting condemned everywhere.
2: To diffuse a situation that at worst could have spiraled towards nuclear war following the Soviet Union threatening to do anything to get them out - and the USSR was genuinely desperate to rehabilitate it's anti-imperialist credentials right after all the bad press they were getting from crushing the Hungarian uprising
3: Britain and France lied to the US about their intentions and plans and had their diplomats intentionally deceive ours while launching a military strategy we had expressly forbidden. If you're gonna be the hegemon you can't be tolerating that.
As for Vietnam, America just didn't want another Korean War.
Remember, this is the same guy who signed orders to coup anti-colonial leaders in between rounds of golf, he didn't identify with their movement.
Soriek
1yr ago
Completely agreed Roosevelt had an unusual commitment to decolonization, but what about Nixon stands out to you? (past like the same kind of empty-but-supportive debate rhetoric that Kennedy also made when they were first running - and Kennedy of course went on to write up the interventions against the DR and Brazil later launched under LBJ). Insofar as Nixon's policies wrt colonization are memorable to me it's in the "Tar Baby" strategy of supporting the colonial-relic white minority governments in Southern Africa, even against growing domestic public sentiment in the US. His posture there feels like the opposite of "ideological impulse rather than practicality as necessary or if necessary".
Otherwise no huge objection - America did want to end colonialism and contributed somewhat towards hastening its end, I just don't think it was really all that important to us? The strongest direct actions I think we took were opposing Salazar and threatening to boot the Netherlands out of the Marshall plan if they didn't leave Indonesia - the rest was just not directly getting involved in the Empires' counter-revolutionary wars, which I think is too tall an ask for America fresh out of several wars.
Sometimes we ignored colonialism, sometimes we supported it in ways (sending Britain funds in Malaya and France materiel in Vietnam). When and where we did oppose colonialism feels for me less driven by ideology than by the same issues of Suez repeated elsewhere: weakening potential rivals and bolstering our credentials with the various non-aligned countries during the Cold War. If we truly felt ourselves to be kindred spirits with the other colonies, it's a little strange that we didn't feel dissonance putting those kindred spirits under new dictators that replicated the worst aspects of colonial rule - as long as they now reported back to us. As in, there might have been people that felt motivated by ideology, but it was a an ideology of such a self-serving sort that it's hard to distinguish from what someone would have done motivated by realpolitik alone.
I will read your link though (it may have answered my questions), I'm just trying to find a non-jstor version of it.
Soriek
1yr ago
Isn't this his point? Since the constitution doesn't guarantee a freedom of association then you don't have that right, AKA there's no reason the states can't infringe upon it, which is what they did in quite extreme fashion during segregation - if I as an individual wanted to go to McDonalds with my friend of a different race I was deprived of that right and legally barred from doing so. By ending the State's ability to prevent people of different races from voluntarily comingling, surely the CRA represented one of our history's more dramatic expansions in freedom of association.
Soriek
1yr ago
Fwiw quite a few of the founders seemed to think judicial review was going to be a thing; Hamilton famously argued for it in the Federalist Papers. It was already practiced in State and Federal Courts and of course for a long time in English Common Law, so I don't know if it should be counted that highly as a legal revolution, at least as measured by how far it departed from founding intent and the historical context.
Soriek
1yr ago
Basically, the Constitution is a document of enumerated powers, meaning the federal government can't--in theory--do anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it to do. But the judicially-crafted breadth of the Fourteenth Amendment, combined with loose interpretation of the Commerce and Tax-and-Spend clauses, metastasized through the 20th century into today's rather grabby American legal system.
This is kind of a nitpick aside from the article, which was interesting, but the constitution solely as a document of enumerated powers has never been the singular interpretation in the US, and didn't end with the Fourteenth Amendment (which is not to say that things haven't changed since then). The Doctrine of Implied Powers, based on the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause and the General Welfare Clause, has been with us since the founding and let the government do some pretty seismic stuff it was explicitly written that it could do, like create a national bank and establish the middle third of the country.
Ironically, during the Lochner Era at least, the Fourteenth Amendment was used to argue not for but against economic redistribution-y measures like minimum wage and maximum working hour laws on the basis that they violated freedom of contract, which was protected (in their opinion) by the 14th's Due Process Clause. When the Government started passing federal versions of those laws in the 30s they were awarding themselves regulatory power against the contemporary precedent set by the 14th.
Soriek
1yr ago
IANAL but my understanding is that the Ninth Amendment has never been held to confer substantive rights (which seems to be what the linked wiki page affirms as well). If it is supposed to do that, and Americans have always had a right to freedom of association, then surely segregation was always unconstitutional and the CRA just reestablished the right to association that we were supposed to have.
Soriek
1yr ago
Works for me, but doesn't change that the argument that freedom of association is listed in the constitution is incorrect, hence why the states were capable of infringing upon that right during segregation.
As best as I can tell, the first time the Courts ruled that we did have a right to freedom of association it was NAACP vs. Alabama, which is much my point above - that the Civil Rights Era was a legal expansion of freedom of association rather than a contraction of it.
Soriek
1yr ago
Interestingly, if they wanted a show about black pharaohs I think we assume the Kushite Empire leaders were black, at least they came by way of Sudan. A little bit earlier in time than Cleopatra though.
Why isn’t anarchism talked about more?
Around the turn of the previous century anarchism probably seemed like the threat to established society. The late nineteenth-early twentieth century saw an enormous amount of intellectual output in anarchist philosophy, producing such famous-to-this-day anarchist thinkers and political scientists as Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and James Guillaume. To many it seemed like just as viable a revolutionary philosophy as socialism, and played major roles in radical, secessionist movements like the Catalan independence fighters and the Paris Commune.
And the violence that emerged from this movement was breathtaking. Anarchists pursued “propaganda of the deed,” or expressing their philosophy through acts of violence. Bombings became standard fare across the western world, claiming scores of victims - up until the 1990s World Trade bombing, the anarchist bombing of Wall Street in 1920 was the bloodiest act of terrorism in the US. The Palmer Raids, often focused on for their anti-socialist agenda, were in just as large part about expelling anarchists following the Galleanist bombing campaigns.
But this was far bigger than just the US - anarchist assassins killed no less than nine (nine!) heads of state across the western world! It happened to William Mckinley of the US, Czar Alexander II of Russia, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Sadi Carnot of France, Prime Minister Del Castillo of Spain, Prime Minister Iradier, also of Spain, King Umberto I of Italy, King George of Greece, and King Charles of Portugal. That is crazy. It was so bad that the turn of the century is sometimes called “the golden age of assassination”. There were even international conferences of the major powers in Rome and St Petersburg to form coalitions to fight against international anarchism.
My broad theory of the era is this: prior to the industrial revolution many more people were still functionally “self-employed,” working on their own farm, or as an artisan, or managing their store. Throughout the nineteenth century the modern divisions of capitalists and wage laborers, who would live and die working for someone else, really grew and solidified over time. This brought growth, but I think it was likely also a wrenching, unpleasant experience for most people, and a lot of radical movements since have been a form of response to that sense that something about modern society is deeply unnatural.
Even for countries with recent traditions of serfdom, like Russia and Austria, the changes in day-to-day life everywhere from industrialization were vast. The immense, impersonal scale of capitalism, the constant supervision, workers used to setting their own schedules and working at their own pace finding strict schedules thrust upon them, a shift so significant it came in many places with the literal synchronization of standardized time. At the extremes, capitalist modernity created institutions like company towns, where workers with no rights labored from dawn till dusk under the constant watchful eye of the manager, lived in apartments owned by the corporation, purchased all their goods and food from stores owned by the corporation, and walked on streets patrolled by private law enforcement hired for the corporation to enforce rules set by the corporation. You were stripped of all autonomy and ownership and forced to labor in brutal conditions every day; the slightest agitation could be met with brutal repression and you could at any moment be turned out on the streets because you didn’t even own your home, you lived there at the corporation’s behest.
Anarchism seems to be the first way that sort of visceral reaction to these conditions manifested at large scale, and it's understandable in an era when people found themselves in significantly more servile, managed conditions, that those radicalized would rebel against authority itself. Galleani himself, for instance, was radicalized following the mass arrests in Patterson of factory workers striking for an eight hour work day. He went on to create one of the most dangerous anarchist terrorist groups in America. It's a simple response - if society is rotten then tear it down.
But nowadays almost no one other than teenagers seriously pushes anarchism. Yet little more than a century ago scarcely a year would go by without a head of state being murdered by an anarchist. Where did what once seemed like a global threat just disappear to? Did socialism just suck away anarchism’s energy by speaking to the same people disaffected by capitalism but offering a more compelling vision of society? Or was it wrong to consider it anything more than a sensational but somewhat short lived trend, a little like the way the western world speaks less and less about Islamist terrorism?
Soriek
1yr ago
This is a good point I hadn't fully appreciated, that the contest for support between the two schools of thought was often literally a military contest, where the anarchists were bested, and that once socialists societies were built they looked infinitely more viable
Soriek
1yr ago
I think there's something to that, where when you're in the transition to an extremely managed society, by business and by the state, the transition is unpleasant and has a lot of resistance but once you're on the other end things are a lot calmer.
My post was pretty clear that the era I was referring to was the end of the nineteenth century - beginning of the twentieth century. A big part of my post was asking the very question why have things calmed down since then. Starting your measurement in 1920 is like saying fascists had a low body count from 45 onward - true, but not very useful (this is of course not to say these two movements are comparable in violence, just that they had select eras they were active in).
As @Thoroughlygruntled pointed out, your numbers are deflated even for the US, but remember this was also a much bigger phenomenon than just America; there were bombing campaigns across the western world, especially in Russia and Italy. Assassinating nine leaders of the most powerful countries in the world is pretty breathtaking imo - if right wing or Islamist terrorism had accomplished anything of this magnitude I think we would consider them a far, far more serious threat.
Soriek
1yr ago
Ah, no worries at all, I see what you mean, the way the sentence is structured it's weird but there's another half to it
up until the 1990s World Trade bombing, the anarchist bombing of Wall Street in 1920 was the bloodiest act of terrorism in the US.
I didn't mean that the violence sustained over that time period, just that the body count from that particular act of terrorism was a high point for a while after
Which was more common—deciding that the system was flawed, and ought to be removed? Or that the old times were better, and we need to go back? I suspect that nationalism was more common among workers than anarchy ever was.
I assume the latter was more common too, or at least a variety of nationalism that was also promised cool stuff you didn't have in the past. On the other hand, it didn't win everywhere just by having greater numbers; the Bolsheviks probably only really had a small chunk of the population personally backing them (as opposed to backing replacing the Czar with whatever) and they came to power, and then everyone was a Bolshevik. I guess I'm just interested how anarchism fizzled out where other movements grew. There doesn't really need to be a more dramatic answer than other stuff being more compelling or the anarchists losing on the battlefield, I think this post is more driven by my interest that this was such a crazy phenomenon and barely gets talked about these days. Not like there was a shortage of more crazy movements in that era to get distracted by though.
Regardless, the “golden age of assassination” probably has more to do with the industrialization of weapons. Bigger explosives and semi-automatic personal weapons in particular. Revolvers and repeating rifles.
Definitely partially true, though a lot of the weapons were kinda primitive. Of course, weaponry is even more sophisticated nowadays and yet we have less of this, and the Wall Street Bombing for instance was carried out with dynamite, which had been around for half a century without being used for domestic terrorism. I assume there was sort of an overlapping time where 1. improved weapons were at hand, 2. it occurred to radicals and terrorists they could actually use them, and 3. it hadn't occurred to Presidential staff how really vulnerable they were before modern security forces.
Soriek
1yr ago
Seriously, though, the revolver was such an outrageous step up from its predecessors. Five or six rounds in a pocket. And they only became more readily available over the course of the 1800s. You see a similar thing happen in 1900s China with the proliferation of cheap Webley copies and autoloaders.
True and probably something I don't appreciate enough. I remember reading an interesting piece about how much radically (and unsurprisingly) colonialism had to change after accounting for the small arms released throughout the colonies by the new arrivals themselves.
Soriek
1yr ago
What Spain and Russia had in common were that they were two of Europe's least industrialized, poorest countries.
Extremely good point. Anarchism has a bit of a flavor to "leave me alone to go back to what I was doing," which if you're a rural farmer at least does mean sustaining yourself. If you live in a city and already depend on an industrial ecosystem for food and goods, and all the available jobs are industrial in nature, then the most realistic improved scenario is one much the same but with better working and living conditions.
The rest of your post makes me think I really need to read more on Spanish anarchists, I had no idea the movement literally usurped religion in places.
In the US, real wages for young men rose by upwards of 50% (some sources suggest 100%) in the period between 1914-1920 due to labor market tightness. It was, in all likelihood, one of the fastest rises in real incomes anywhere in history. In the UK, there were also smaller real increases, certainly much larger than during the preceding fifteen years.
Elsewhere, especially in France and Italy (which produced so many anarchists), postwar governments and employers reacted to the Bolshevik revolution and high rates of inflation in 1918-1920 by giving industrial workers a lot of what they wanted, including shorter working days and better pay. When the postwar recession hit in 1920-1922, unions were in disarray and some extant socialist movements were torn over events in Russia, and workers had already negotiated better conditions in many cases.
All true, though this burst in prosperity was of course followed shortly by a pretty incredible dip in living conditions during the Great Depression. And socialist movements did indeed rise again in this era, and even continued to raised heck across the western world during the latter-mid century when living conditions were actually pretty good - but anarchism never had a comparable resurgence.
I think basically, though, that you're right: it's a combination of living/working conditions getting a lot better while dissent got cracked down upon, along with @Stefferi's point that anywhere that revolution actually was possible, socialists pretty literally defeated anarchists on the battlefield, and their ability to create viable socialist societies acted as PR that suctioned directionless leftists into their orbit who in another era might have followed the road to Catalonia.
Soriek
1yr ago
I get no meaning whatsoever from my job, but it’s not very difficult and it’s the first good salary I’ve ever had. I’ve spent a long time looking for more meaningful work at lower pay, but the longer I go without success on this job search the less realistic taking a paycut and starting from the bottom again feels. So I guess I’m in the process of giving up on things I’d care about to take a more comfortable but unfulfilling life. I don’t really enjoy any part of that identity and life-fulfillment wise but I try to remind myself that only a few years ago I would have killed for the security I have now.
We stray ever further into our personal experiences but this is another case where I’m sure what you say is true for you, but I just feel the exact opposite. The fact that a car is a private place in a public place is one of my least favorite things about it! It means my most valuable possession, and whatever possessions I might want to store in it, are outside of my house where I can’t keep an eye of them. Instead they sit on the street with the weirdos, and any time I want to go somewhere I have to hope none of the people passing by are gonna mess with it despite the fact that I hear about more car break-ins every week.
I don’t find cars very comfortable either, but in fairness I haven’t had nice cars.
Of course YMMV.
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