Fear itself

What Hacker News says

1. mandevilNov 2024
   When I was in my 20's George W Bush was president of the US, Tony Blair was supporting him 100% on the importance of invading Iraq, and then when I was 26 the bottom dropped out of the economy in the worst economic crash since 1929. So yeah, life wasn't great! Part of why now seems worse is that underlying trends kept getting worse- both US specific things like healthcare and college loans, plus things across the Anglosphere like real estate, and things across the world like climate- but I think a bigger part of it is the lack of real alternatives and the "End of History."

   It seems clear to me that the 1930's everyone was down too: between The Great War, the Influenza Pandemic, and then the Great Depression everyone was clear that the world was on the wrong track and couldn't continue the way it was going. Depending on their particular biases, lots of people ended up thinking Fascism was the answer, and lots others thought that Communism was the answer, but not nearly as many thought that (small-l) liberal democratic capitalism was the way to keep going- the world of 1932 seemed to discredit that entire mode of living. A fascinating book _Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time_ by Ira Katznelson argues that the American leaders who built the New Deal were aware of that, and that they created the New Deal in conscious opposition to either Fascism or Communism. Unless they acted RIGHT NOW, with a response of sufficient scale to offer something better one or the other would inevitably take power.

   And today, decades after the end of the Cold War, leaders and people largely can't conceptualize any other way of organizing people and power, and if they do it's largely in dystopic stuff like "what if companies ruled everything." (This is what Francis Fukuyama meant by the End of History, not that events would stop but that the great struggle of how best to organize people and power was decided and capitalism and democracy won.) Which has meant that we're right back in the same situation, but no one seems to be taking seriously the threat of losing the fruits of the Enlightenment, so they aren't acting with sufficient vigor or scale to deal with the scope of the problem.

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2. travmattDec 2017
   I’m sorry but I can’t discuss politics with people that refuse to answer basic questions about the past and what they believe regarding it without ducking and obfuscation. To me it’s always a sign of concern trolling, especially when the argument then devolves into arguments that really just center around calling others ideologically blinded and calls for perspective and nuance - which you are curiously advocating for by dumping out of context figures and refusing to give context about.

   For others that are interested, the liberal and conservative blocs were the predominant factions of both parties that played pivotal roles in civil rights era legislation. Specifically, the ‘64 bill was passed by factions of mainly northern democratic liberals and liberal republicans - many republicans actually played crucial roles in captaining the legislation through congress and surviving quorum calls organized by the opposing conservative southern and midwestern factions. Looking at the civil rights issue through the perspectives of liberal v conservative is also interesting for other reasons as well. LBJ in many ways was a pseudo-conservative, who by dint of his firmly conservative credentials was able to position himself to be mentored by and ultimately betray his mentor, the leader of the conservative faction and the strongest force for segregation in America - the senator Richard Russell. In the larger tapestry of American history, Russell was also a new dealer, which in many ways was a deal in which conservatives accepted the progressive safety net in exchange for entrenching the socioeconomic subjugation of minorities through carve-outs to their eligibility to receive aforementioned benefits. This is the thesis behind Ira Katznelson’s ‘Fear Itself’.

   Additionally, America has been undergoing a political realignment in which party and ideology are increasingly correlated - there are fewer liberal Republicans and fewer conservative Democrats, which in turn has led to greater political polarization and the greater political paralysis we see today. Understanding the drivers of the realignment between conservatives and liberals is crucial to understanding American politics today.

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