Before the storm

What Hacker News says

1. tptacekDec 2022
   Violent suppression of labor organizing is a prominent part of American history. Read, for instance, Rick Perlstein's "Before The Storm" about what happened at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, more recently than the steel strike we're talking about here.
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2. hodgesrmMay 2021
   I'm sad to say I don't. It was in a German-language interview and really stuck in my head. "Jeden Tag ein bisschen mehr Selbstdisziplin."

   She wrote a memoir about her upbringing in East Prussia called "Kindheit in Ostpreussen." The English translation is entitled "Before the Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia." [1] It's a somewhat wandering story but the account of growing up in a Prussian aristocratic family on a huge estate is quite marvelous. That world--for better or worse--has perished almost without a trace.

   [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138357.Before_The_Storm

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3. tptacekFeb 2021
   There's some historical truth in here but the overall thrust of your comment is wrong. The realignment between the Democrats and Republicans was not primarily economic, and was in fact driven by civil rights: opponents of civil rights legislation switched from the Democratic to Republican parties, leaders in the Republican party capitalized on that to realign the Solid South, which as a side effect canted the GOP more rural and the Democratic party more urban, which reinforced the Democratic racial coalition and also further shifted more conservative rural voters into the GOP.

   The process was already in motion in the early 1960s, and was a key part of Goldwater's strategy in '64. Perlstein's "Before The Storm" is a good book on this.

   The notion that Nixon was an advocate for anti-segregation reform in the south is especially risible. Nixon did, in fact, appeal to the pre-'64 anti-civil-rights agenda of the southern states. Last time we talked about this, I put the Nixon campaign on the record, in a contemporaneous source pursuing this strategy:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742135

   You responded with a revisionist Claremont Review article, which is approximately the same thing as me responding to one of your comments with a Robin DiAngelo article. Amusingly, one of the Claremont article's sources is... Kevin Phillips, the subject of the contemporaneous news story I cited to you.

   I can make it simpler for you. Here, from the article I posted, is a direct quote from Phillips, a primary source of your Claremont article on the "Myth of the Racist Republican":

   All the talk of the Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [Senator Jacob k. Javits] only gets 20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 precent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

   Here I pause to request that you "wait for it", and note that if we weren't buried deep in a random thread that the good play here would have been to stop before the ellipsis, wait for someone to point out the VRA thing, and then unveil the rest of the quote, Simpsons "How To Cook Forty Humans" style, but, anyways:

   The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide in their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

   Persiflage, this revisionist history of ideological sorting. Persiflage, I say.

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4. knucklesandwichMay 2017
   The idea of "tough on crime" was born from the political elites though. Read the Rick Perlstein trilogy, particularly the first two books "Before the Storm" and "Nixonland", which go into this depth. It was used to exploit racial resentment in the civil rights era as part of the "Southern Strategy" as Democrats began accepting civil rights into their political program (and eventually to blame the Civil Rights Act for crime). Racism is obviously a persistent problem here, as well as classism (which is often an unexamined cultural phenomenon in the US) and a culture of vengeance. Vengeance is a DISTINCTLY American idea that has been with us since our calvinist roots and is part of our cultural image in everything from our forever war of foreign intervention to our films (particularly Tarantino films exhibit this). It's a sick, contemptible cultural tenet.

   We can begin to reverse this by electing DAs like Philly just has: Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who has made lowering sentences where he has prosecutorial discretion and refusing to try insufficient cases a part of his platform ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEFPHMrAKc ). It will also take citizen pressure to ensure these people follow through on their program as they join a thoroughly racist, punitive institution. Also, people must be willing to elect representatives that will cut criminal penalties across the board. Simply cutting them for nonviolent crimes will not solve the problem: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the...

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