Is there any merit to framing conflicts of the recent past in ideological terms?
For example, the events leading up to WWII could be described as #fascism vs #communism, until you learn about the economic and military pacts Bolsheviks made with Hitler and Mussolini.
Sure, Brownshirts were fighting communists on the streets of Berlin, but once each side captured their own state, differences were set aside for the greater project of making their respective nations stronger.
Similarly, the Cold War was supposedly about capitalism vs communism, until you learn about China embracing Kissinger and the Sino-Soviet split.
It feels like nationalism is the singular dominant ideology of the XX and XXI century and all other ideologies are incidental and need to align themselves with the ultimate goal of "how to make our country strong".
This is a very valid point and I think it can’t be reduced to “either…or”. That is each of these factors (economy, geography, nationalism, racism) played some role but which one became decisive largely depended on social dynamics.
For example, Marxism was reductionist in explaining literally everything through economic relations. At the same time, Zeev Sternhell in his “Fascist ideology” described this kind of reductionism as the most devastating mistake of 20th century as it underestimated the power of primitive tribal instincts that emerged at mass scale in the form of fascism and Nazism.
@kravietz Agreed, nationalism can't explain everything. Contemporary India or the Middle East are two examples where the religious angle is necessary to understand what's going on.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it looks to me like the recent history is mostly about state actors jostling to make their respective nations more powerful, while non-state actors strive to become one, i.e. capture the state or carve out a territory for themselves. Ideology is secondary at best, but still useful for sure.
@jackofalltrades It's not communism vs. fascism or capitalism vs. communism, it's authoritarianism vs. liberalism. Communism and fascism are authoritarian, but they go about it in different ways. Both seek to concentrate power in the hands of the few. In fascism, it's the Leader; in communism, it's the Party.
Liberalism aims to diffuse power through checks and balances, relying on strong institutions rather than individuals. That's why authoritarians try to subvert and weaken our institutions.
The “checks and balances” part of particularly American liberalism is primarily about managing intra-elite competition and making it procedurally difficult to change the status quo.
American political culture has fetishized this set of elite management tools as some intrinsic good, as if what we really need are more filibusters to stop incredibly popular political programs that threaten the interests of wealthy elites from being enacted into law.
Filibusters are a procedural veto point that has been added to the original constitutional set of “checks and balances,” which is true of many other processes that are similarly not part of the constitution but are used to make sure our wealthy elites stay wealthy elites.
@HeavenlyPossum@jackofalltrades@Legit_Spaghetti Agreed. I'm saying, don't diss "checks and balances" when the problem is the accretions that the wealthy managed to insert despite the checks and balances. It's like blaming the antivirus software for what a virus does. Hell, maybe we need MORE checks and balances.
The problem with the “checks and balances” trope is that it is sold as a mechanism for preventing tyranny but Madison, et al, were explicit that the tyranny they sought to prevent was that of poor people using the mechanism of democracy to end their exploitation by wealthy elites.
There is a reason the framers self-consciously modeled the US constitution on the Roman Republic, another oligarchical polity led by wealthy slavers holding hereditary political power.
@HeavenlyPossum@jackofalltrades@Legit_Spaghetti And I disagree. Remember, the industrial revolution hadn't happened yet. The massive Irish and Eastern European migrations hadn't happened yet. Karl Marx hadn't been born. The Framers weren't worried about poor people; they were worried about the kind of populism that's misled by (usually wealthy) demagogues. They were worried about the idiot (and rich-led!) mob that lynched Socrates. They were worried about @MAGA.
Labor revolutions predate the Industrial Revolution and Karl Marx. Please read about Bacon's Rebellion and how the state responded. Trying to put down organized labor was always part of what they thought about. That desire may not have been the sole or primary driver of all specific checks and balances decisions, but it was with them in the room when it happened. Every founder hated laborers; that's why they didn't let them vote.
@chairgirlhands@HeavenlyPossum@jackofalltrades@Legit_Spaghetti
A common misconception. "[B]y the end of the 1780s the qualified electorate in the thirteen states probably fell in the range from about 60 to 90 percent of adult white males, with most states toward the upper end."
snip
"Across the nation as a whole, at least 80 percent of adult white males could vote." Ratcliffe, The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828 (https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2013.0033)
The intro to the article (screencapped) lays it out clearly.
Yes, as Madison noted in Federalist #10, members of his class had been complaining about people voting for things they didn’t like and worried that any democratic process would inevitably favor the majority of the poor over the interests of his elite class. He instead proposes a republican system that would, for example, prevent debtors from voting against creditors to eliminate their debts.
This is why the constitution, an illegal coup against the US government, contains so many counter-democratic mechanisms (the senate, the electoral college, the 3/5 compromise, etc) designed to make it nearly impossible for popular majorities to change the status quo in ways unfavorable to elites.
The “balances” part of the equation was about ensuring no one segment of the propertied elite could dominate the others. Ie, the slaver aristocracy of the south vs the creditor aristocracy of the northeast.
The “checks” part of the equation was about ensuring that no electoral majority could change anything unless that change also had the endorsement of the propertied elite. This is why, for example, the US continues to lack policies like universal healthcare or legal abortion despite those policies being wildly popular.
The framers were explicitly worried about the poor taking away their prerogatives by voting away the state’s ability to coercively extract resources from the poor. Madison articulated this most clearly in Federalist #10.
They were not worried about the experience of Socrates more than two millennia earlier; they were worried that contemporaneous people were doing things like voting against rentier extraction to pay wealthy creditors like Madison.
I realize that this sort of fawning deference to the framers is inculcated in Americans as a civic religion, but it’s still immensely frustrating to hear it over and over because it is so obscenely ahistorical.
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