This is interesting about changes in US political views:
According to the 2019 Pew survey, 55 percent of white people over age 65 think too much attention is being paid to race and racial issues in America. So do 56 percent of white Americans who have a high school degree or less.
In contrast, a majority of white people with a bachelor’s degree or more either think America is discussing racial issues an appropriate amount or that the nation isn’t talking about them enough. A majority of white people between 18 and 49 also hold this view.
Research from Data for Progress suggests that white millennials are much more likely than older white people to agree that black people in America face structural racial discrimination.
You are probably thinking that white people with bachelor’s degrees and under age 50 are increasingly aligned with Democrats, so if many college-educated white people and white people under 50 are Democrats, could they have simply have adjusted their racial views to match the broader Democratic Party?
But there’s some evidence that people are increasingly choosing which party they align with based on racial issues. So it might also be the case that some white people under 50 and college-educated white people see a lot of racial discrimination in America, and that causes them to align with Democrats, while people who think racial issues get too much attention are aligning with the GOP.
Finding solace in literature, and walking the streets of Washington DC in a plague (before the demonstrations).
Washington is often thought of as the federal government’s company town, its inhabitants in some way owing their souls to Uncle Sam’s company store. That has never been true and could not be further from the truth. Anyone who has lived in this city long enough knows that Washington has always been a literary town, its cultural fabric held together by writers and artists rather than bureaucrats and politicians. The pandemic has proved it. It has revealed how Washington was defined by its literary culture and the institutions that support it. Once these were gone, it became clear how central they were to what made this city vibrant.…And yet, during early morning walks through an empty city in April, paying attention in a wholly new way, I became acutely aware of being surrounded by literature, of how it manifests on many of Washington’s streets in the places where writers once wrote and lived, their words etched in stone.
It’s taken me about two weeks to get through this, and it’s very rich, but I found this really, really interesting, with lots to chew on. A conversation among black intellectuals about, well, a lot of things, published in Salmagundi.
[F]ar from Western philosophy being the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, it was all along, but particularly from the early modern period on, much sooner an enfolding of foreign spirits, faintly discerned, generally misunderstood, often held in contempt by the voyagers who first encountered them and by the philosophers who got reports of them, but nonetheless fundamental for the emerging shape and character of modern European thought.
Sort of inspirational. A lot to chew on, in this talk.
Still one of the strangest stories I know of—the murder (really, assassination) of a U of Chicago professor in the spring of 1991, in the U of Chicago Divinity school. I had met him several weeks before this happened, in fact, on my tour of the school. And here's an old narration of this, from a book about the murder in 1996.
There’s a fascinating struggle brewing in the EU’s legal world, about the relationship between national law and Union law. A German court argued that central parts of the EU’s economic policy are illegitimate. There’s a good background podcast here, in one of my favorite podcasts, Talking Politics. This AM I came across this alarming piece by an EU judge explaining why this act is problematic—most especially because it suggests a strategy to de-legitimate EU policies for authoritarian regimes, like Hungary and Poland. Of course the irony is that the German court’s argument was that it was the EU being authoritarian; the fact that the EU judge doesn’t even register the irony of his complaint is telling about how many pro-EU actors don’t seem fully aware of how they come across. Anyway, this is a complicated situation and we should all keep an eye on it: this stuff is problematic, and while the EU certainly needs reforms, I don’t think the world would be better off without some kind of Europe-wide political coordination.
In 1948, Steven Spender reviewed Albert Camus’s novel THE PLAGUE in the New York Times. Still worth reading.
Nice: Jacob T. Levy on how “classical liberals” (by which I think he means libertarians) should not be afraid of the idea of intersectionality.
No one is ever only their race, only their gender, only their religion, only their sexual orientation—even if any one of those might tell us important things about their social standing, their vulnerability, their legal rights, their political power. Each of those categories may have real explanatory power (“may,” always “may”) about a person’s life or a society’s structure. But there’s no one of them, not even any particular combination of them, that is ever the end of the inquiry. Always being willing to ask the intersectional questions—What other identity might matter? Does the general phenomenon manifest differently for a subgroup, particularly for a subordinate group? Once we’ve identified a group pattern, what various patterns might it be encompassing or hiding?—remind us never to treat any one of those identities or cleavages as the whole of a society, or the whole of a person.
Also, I note that, so far as I can tell, every single commentator on his piece--and the comments are pretty uniformly from a libertarian perspective, and uniformly negative--is a white man.