Hard News by Russell Brown

A danger of the present political barbarism may yet be that it prevents Americans from learning from their own history.

One of many. Their budget proposal is truly astonishing - they seem to really want to pull the plug on Government support for the generation and propagation of knowledge across a remarkably broad swath of human endeavour. The vandals are sacking Rome.

The vandals are sacking Rome.

It seems that way.

The vandals are sacking Rome.

Only this time, the vandals are from within Rome's fortifications - and that includes the North American Maginot Line, oops, Mexican Border Wall proposal.

Going by his previous predictions, Johan Galtung is predicting that America could be in for a Soviet-grade downfall.

Going by his previous predictions, Johan Galtung is predicting that America could be in for a Soviet-grade downfall.

The further they let Trump go, the worse it's going to be.
#MakeAmericaAGreatBigCraterAgain

But probity will win in the end, right?

"according to science"

What is that site, anyway? It's looks like the kind of place one might pick up malware...

It sounds like a fascinating documentary, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

It's the part of the Prohibition struggle that pitted the rural America against the thriving cities, conservatism against liberalism and modernity.

I believe there's a word for that - Poujadism.

This is the excellent writer Jonathan Raban talking about Sarah Palin in 2008, but it's even more apropos now:

Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man.

The French got out of that (to some degree) by:
- modernising rapidly. Rural France in 1950 was like a developing country - the change from that to today's autoroutes, hypermarches and nuclear power stations was one of the most abrupt in Europe.
- constructing a political system (the Fifth Republic) that ensured the peasants would have a limited ability to interfere with the programmes of the elite

I notice my relatives in the US who supported Trump in the election run up with lots of Trump/Republican rah, rah Facebook posts are eerily silent on politics now. It's not a case of winners remorse - rather it's just - silence. And that's what makes it eerie.