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KulakRevolt  1yr ago (anarchonomicon.substack.com)   3101 thread views

Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence: We used to be a Civilization

anarchonomicon.substack.com

A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.

The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.

Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.

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Yeah, my criticism of this piece goes something like this:

I agree that something has declined WRT oratory, but is it that things genuinely declined post-WWII, or is it more that the message has new channels through which it can be spread?

Certainly, a liberal might counter with FDR, JFK, or MLK, people who are literally popularly-quoted, whose most famous speech quotes formed the backbone of the 90's version of American Civics. Nowadays, memes are the most evocative vehicles for the transmission of ideas.

Certainly, a liberal might counter with FDR, JFK, or MLK

That would be a terrible counter. The youngest of those (MLK) was 12 when WWII started, and had shown significant oratory prowess before the end of WWII (winning an oratory contest in 1944). It would be hard for the intentional de-prioritization of oratory in the aftermath of WWII to impact any of them.

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