Why we are who we are, and how we got that way.

pettyfog · Jun 9, 2007

Written about a lot, and for those who navel-gaze even a little bit, never hurts to read again:

Geprge Will review of 'Age of Abundance:How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.'

Key points that struck me.

Lindsey rightly says that “today’s typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago.” And “the typical bluestate liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power.”
........
..he acutely sees that “the Aquarian project” had its own cultural contradictions: “Without the immensely intricate division of labor developed and constantly elaborated by capitalism, there would have been no mass affluence; without mass affluence, there could have been no counterculture.”
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And the crux of the matter:

Fast-forward to the end of the 1950s, when suddenly the number of Americans enrolled in colleges exceeded the number of American farmers. That decade, which has more than its fair share of cultured despisers, is remembered principally for (in Lindsey’s unenthralled description) “climbing the company ladder and winning the rat race and keeping up with the Joneses.”
But these preoccupations, even obsessions, were, Lindsey says, “freely chosen — which meant that other choices were possible.” The people who would eventually make other choices, and who by doing so would threaten the postwar social order, “lay in the quiet night of suburbia, slumbering in the children’s bedrooms.”
By 1960, in “The End of Ideology,” Daniel Bell had written that “the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals.” By the end of that decade, those slumbering children had awakened and gone to college. There they worked out a stance toward life suited to the first generation that knew only a condition that no other generation had ever known — the absence of scarcity.
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Which anyone who understands or TRIES to understand, the 'progressive mindset' sees as explaining some things.

I have to keep reminding myself that Socialism IS a religion, and even after its god dies, the worship remains.

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Like THIS!

If Only Greens Saw The Forest For The Trees

By ROY INNIS

"People here have no jobs," Mark Fenn admitted, after taking documentary producers on a tour of his $35,000 catamaran and the site of his new coastal home. "But... if you could count how many times they smile in a day, if you could measure stress" and compare that with "well-off people" in London or New York, "then tell me, who is rich and who is poor?"
{*}
Fenn is coordinator of the World Wildlife Fund's campaign against a proposed mining project near Fort Dauphin, Madagascar. The locals strongly support the project and want the jobs, development, improved living standards and environmental quality the state-of-the-art operation will bring.
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Maybe I dont get the point that this 'informed elitist save the world' type is trying to make because I'm a 'Conservative' but what is Roy Innis?

Only a guy who tries to get stuff done without making an ass of himself... unlike Revs Jackson and Sharpton.

Why we are who we are, and how we got that way.

pettyfog Well-Known Member

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Why we are who we are, and how we got that way.

pettyfog Well-Known Member

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