Some of Us Were Worried about America Before the Election (part 2)

Last updated on: February 23, 2017 at 3:57 pm By D. G. Hart

Dwight Macdonald, a mid-twentieth century Marxist critic who wrote for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New Republic, and Partisan Review (among others), was worried about the effects of mass culture (think Donald Trump’s celebrity in The Apprentice) on American institutions. The following is from his famous essay, “Masscult & Midcult“: The question of Masscult is part of the larger question of the masses. The tendency of modern industrial society, whether in the USA or the USSR, is... Read more

America’s Original Greatness

Last updated on: February 22, 2017 at 4:45 pm By D. G. Hart

Once upon a time, Americans celebrated George Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1732. Now that we have lost our republican virtues, we prefer three-day weekends and car sales to stand alone days for presidential birthdays. And what we have lost along with those virtues is the kind of foreign policy that Washington outlined in his farewell address, one that keeps us from thinking that the world depends on the United States: nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies... Read more

Make Niebuhr Modest Again

Last updated on: February 16, 2017 at 3:55 pm By D. G. Hart

I understand the easy target that President Trump is. But sometimes the swings boomerang, such as when Kate Massinger and Rebecca Collins assert that “Trumpian bravado and Niebuhrian sobriety just don’t seem to jibe.” Neither does Niebuhrian sobriety jibe with claims of Reinhold Niebuhr’s greatness: And great [Niebuhr] was. An American Conscience tells the story of this Midwestern German Protestant with care, utilizing photographs and film clips, excerpts from writings, and interviews with fans from Andrew Bacevich to David Brooks... Read more

Some of Us Were Worried About America before the Election

Last updated on: February 14, 2017 at 5:08 pm By D. G. Hart

If you read H. L. Mencken with any sense that he has a point, you were not convinced the United States was exceptional before Donald Trump became POTUS: What, then, is the spirit of Americanism? I precipitate it conveniently into the doctrine that the way to ascertain the truth about anything, whether in the realms of exact knowledge, in the purple zone of the fine arts or in the empyrean reaches of metaphysics, is to take a vote upon it,... Read more

Distinguishing Good Catastrophism from Bad Catastrophism

Last updated on: February 10, 2017 at 5:03 pm By D. G. Hart

Again, a hearty thanks to President Trump for restoring clarity to national conversations about a myriad of subjects. Today’s insight comes from E. J. Dionne’s column that attempts to put lots of distance between President Trump and Pope Francis through Stephen Bannon: On the surface, some of Bannon’s economic views would seem to match Francis’s. In his speech broadcast to the group in Rome, Bannon spoke against “a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating... Read more

How Many Times Can the U.S. Lose Its Innocence?

Last updated on: February 7, 2017 at 4:55 pm By D. G. Hart

One of my favorite books in grad school was Henry F. May’s The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Time, 1912-1917. The book is a masterful treatment of the variety of literary, philosophical, and political developments that replaced Victorianism with a modernist sensibility. Turns out, after President Trump’s moral equivalency of the U.S. and Russia — “what do you think? Our country is so innocent.” — that May was wrong. The U.S., even its... Read more

Can We Have a National Conversation about Decency?

Last updated on: February 3, 2017 at 5:54 pm By D. G. Hart

Today seems about as good as any to raise the question of national standards of decency because early this morning WIP, a sports-talk radio station in Philadelphia, held its 25th Wing Bowl. It is an eating contest — chicken wings in particular — but a whole lot more. Here is how I described it seven years ago: a lot of overweight men are gathering, accompanied by scantily clad women, to participate in Wing Bowl, a warm up party and eating... Read more

Living in TV Reality

Last updated on: February 2, 2017 at 4:48 pm By D. G. Hart

I have often wondered what the nature of national sovereignty was like under Soviet Communism. Leaders like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu or Yugoslavia’s Tito seemed to have a degree of autonomy in the way they conducted national affairs that did not fit with the lessons I learned about the Soviet Union as a high school student. The Soviets were tyrannical and restricted personal freedom. Yet, the Soviet Union was a union of nation-states, not simply one big Russia. Was it like... Read more

Remember When Separatism was so Fundamentalist?

Last updated on: January 26, 2017 at 4:00 pm By D. G. Hart

Back in the day (and in grad school while studying the history of American evangelicalism), the way to tell the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical was to reach for separatism. Fundamentalists like Carl McIntire (and J. Gresham Machen) severed ties with mainline Protestant denominations so thoroughly that to belong to McIntire’s American Council of Christian Churches, you could not be in a mainline church or belong to the Federal (later National) Council of Churches. But when neo-evangelicalism came... Read more

If Caitlyn Jenner is Normal, Why Can’t Donald Trump Be?

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 12:58 pm By D. G. Hart

Imagine if elite journalists covered Donald Trump the way they did Caitlyn Jenner. Here’s one story (adapted to include POTUS): Caitlyn Jenner’s Donald Trump’s highly choreographed emergence has precipitated an important national conversation about transgender issues bigotry, but it has also led to a useful discussion about the stereotyping of age maleness, the valorization of a certain form of beauty nationalism, and the perpetuation of damaging gender norms whiteness. Here’s another: But it would not be absurd to liken Caitlyn’s... Read more