Western tradition has some good things and some not. Namely, democracy is good and imperialism is bad. So it’s telling that Rubio chose to praise Alexander the Great (among other conquerors) who even Victor Davis Hansen (a very MAGA classics professor) has said is best compared to Hitler, rather than say Solon or Pericles or Themistocles or someone along those lines who represents democracy.
When people on the left are anti-Western, it is almost always against the imperialism and not the democracy. Land acknowledgments are a criticism solely of imperialism and not democracy. (And it is not comparable to say that long-dead Native tribes fighting amongst themselves is the same as our current dominant civilization conquering multiple continents in a one-sided romp). If you want to have a broadly popular pro-Western front, one must reject imperialism and focus Western tradition on democracy only.
The war to save the West is definitely worth fighting. Matt's wishful thinking that his Progressives will do the heavy lifting is of a piece with his overall inability to decouple from his incurable partisanship. There several eyes and several motes. Matt lives in denial.
I am down a rabbit hole re-reading The Clash of Civilizations and related articles -- both positive and negative. In case others might want to follow a similar path, I will share a few links:
It is a real testament to the quality of Huntington's thinking and writing that his framework for analysis still feels relevant and worthy of debate 30+ years later.
One does sort of have to hand it to the Russians both the left's anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism and the right's Reactionary anti-Westernism are significantly intellectually fueled and spread by Russian Hybrid War efforts just across different decades.
The line from Soviet and Fellow travelers thought and at times funding whatever the US does is the problem, only US actions are imperial is obvious. The line, and the money and thought on the current Reactionary anti-Westernism is just as obvious.
The tankie line (that maritime colonial empires are bad but contiguous imperial civilization-states are good) was all too convenient for Russia, being the ultimate land empire that it is.
"Native Americans have much lower household incomes and life expectancies than the American average, with worse educational and labor market opportunities. This is a failure of our national community, and it’s a failure worth trying to rectify."
This statement is absolutely true, and American Indian/Native American issues should be a much higher priority in our national politics than they are.
But speaking this way treats the various indigenous nations as just another American minority group, like Italian Americans or Armenian Americans. But Native Americans aren't simply another minority. They are nations in their own right, with tribal sovereignty. The wellbeing and prosperity of each tribe is not only the responsibility of our national community (tribes have tribal sovereignty, but not full national sovereignty), it is also the responsibility of their national/tribal community.
I think it's worth taking Native American tribes seriously as nations, with rights of self determination like other nations. Taking Native American nations seriously means recognizing them not merely as disadvantaged minority communities within the United States, but as political communities with their own sovereignty, rights, and responsibilities. That doesn't necessarily mean full independence. There are many different models of self determination, whether through independence, or federalism, or autonomous regions, multinational statehood, or tribal sovereignty like we already have. Nations should be able to have some choice in how this relationship looks like. The important thing is to treat Indigenous nations as genuine political communities entitled to meaningful self-government (if they want it), rather than simply as minority populations whose fortunes depend on federal policy.
And I think this requires something of a shift in mindset, including how we understand sovereignty itself. Sovereignty is not just a collection of rights or privileges. It also entails a sovereign mindset: political agency, accountability, and responsibility for the prosperity of one's nation. Indigenous nations should be empowered to exercise that responsibility, and the United States should respect their ability to do so.
This informs how we speak about land acknowledgments. Nations can have deep historical ties to lands that they no longer govern. But this is not sufficient to confer territorial sovereignty, nor should we indulge the idea that it does. We should distinguish between historical and spiritual attachment and legitimate political claims, just as we do with any other nation in the world. Land acknowledgements seek to blur these lines.
I may have commented about this at some point in the past on some post or other, but there often seems to be a strange reluctance to recognize that all the different Native American nations and tribes sometimes warred and drove each other from different pieces of land, and didn't live in peace for all time since the first crossing of the Bering Strait. Go to the museum at the Crazy Horse Memorial, and there's not much about change overtime before the Europeans arrived. Go to Poverty Point, whose inhabitants are long gone with no known modern descendants, and the museum and explanatory videos don't even consider the possibility that the biggest mound, with one narrow entrance from the rear, surrounded by big wooden posts, with a clear view all the way to the river, that no one ever lived on, might have been a fortification, or really anything other than ceremonial.
"While certainly the land was appropriated from people who were already living there, so was all the other land on Earth — including the lands appropriated by Native American groups from the different nations that were living there before they arrived."
Herein lies my uneasy sympathy with the Nakba. In 1946 Poles murdered 42 Jews at Kielce, a third of Germans in the American zone told pollsters the final solution had been necessary, and half still called Nazism a good idea badly carried out. European Jews had to go somewhere, and the Yishuv was willing to take them. Nobody else was.
The problem with the settler impulse is that it becomes addictive. A nation that canonized Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Sharon was certain to breed the irregular settlers who now lynch Palestinians; Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the IDF's Central Command chief, called the 2023 Huwara rampage "a pogrom carried out by outlaws." American founder worship produced filibustering settlers like the defenders of the Alamo, the Bear Flaggers in California, William Walker in Nicaragua, and Narciso López in Cuba.
So the question was never whether Israel's founding was a theft. Every founding was. The question is whether a country can canonize its land-grabbers without spawning land crazed lynch mobs. We could not.
“Every founding was a theft” - this sounds sage but is nowhere close to true and just used to justify the few that actually were.
The reality is that most countries that exist today were founded through decolonization, where the colonial powers left and told the people in certain regions to fend for themselves. While a few of those nations went on to steal land from others, most of them didn’t.
I'm an American and I believe in doing everything possible to help Ukraine. But I strongly support the AfD and I know I would be voting for them if I were a German.
Large-scale Islamic migration to Germany makes it weaker. And a weak Germany will help no one but the Russians. And who knows, maybe the AfD will run to the center on foreign policy after taking over, a la Meloni.
I am probably in the minority around here when I express understanding of why people have voted for Trump 3 times. Similarly I understand why Germans may support AfD. That said, I don't at all understand "strongly" supporting Trump or the AfD. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but it seems counterproductive to what people claim to support. For example, you seem to support Urkaine, but "strongly support" a political party that strongly opposes military and financial support for Ukraine. I don't see why strongly supporting them would send a message to them that they need to change their position on Russia nor would it seem to send a message to other parties that they could early your vote if they change their position on immigration.
Likewise, people can vote for Trump or some other MAGA candidate if their number one issue is a strong border or if you care about trans issues more than anything else. I mean people only have two options typically. But the full throated, near 100% support for all Trump does seems counter productive if people want better options. For example, I am probably going to vote for AES. But I don't strongly support him, don't have yard sign out for him, will not work a phone bank for him, etc. and if he's elected I will let contact his office if he takes positions with which I disagree.
Again, maybe I'm splitting hairs or reading too much into your "strongly support" choice of words. But if we want less extreme parties we can't go around saying we fully and strongly support the more extreme candidates.
The AfD are big fans of Russia and are regularly caught collaborating with the Russians to pursue Russian foreign policy goals. So you are hoping that the Putinversteher will lose an internal battle against the German patriots in the AfD after they are brought to power. What leads you to make this enormous gamble?
I hear ya. I can concretely answer your question, though. What lead me here was repeatedly reading in the news about Islamic terrorists killing Germans at Christmas markets.
On Russia, as I understand it AfD wants to spend Ukraine's aid on Germans instead. Selfish and shortsighted, but not completely illogical. They also want to reopen oil imports from Russia. Considering the pipeline was christened by Angela Merkel, I find the idea that its reopening by the AfD would constitute an unprecedented betrayal of the German people to be a bit rich. Even though I ultimately oppose it.
Ehh, its a little overstated how much of an eastern phenomenon AfD is. They are stronger in the east, don't get me wrong, but I think its like an extra ten percent. It'd be like calling MAGA fundamentally a southern thing. Southerners are more MAGA than the rest of the nation, sure, but its not like there's no one north of the Potomac in a little red hat.
Most AfD and die linke support in Germany seems to be coming from a profound dissatisfaction of the status quo by young people (squeezed by poor growth, high taxes, and high costs of living.)
It’s mostly contrarian support from people who feel like they are giving low priority than outsiders and old people.
That is my read. It sucks that these parties are so aligned with Russian imperialism.
My read is that they highest levels of support for the AfD are from middle-aged men (many in the east) who feel left behind by economic, political, and cultural changes since the fall of the Wall. So I think I fundamentally disagree with you. The youth are voting Green.
It sucks there are vocal people who are so down on America. On the left you have this anti Americanism intellectually laundered and it really just boils down to contrarianism (I am smart because I don’t believe the things dumb people do.)
On the right you have this extreme nihilism. These people embrace arbitrary moral relativism and justify it with “well those people did bad thing or are bad therefore I can act bad.” It has them completely rejecting American values and advocating for monarchism/aristocratic privilege.
Both of these groups really are just embracing loser energy. Like they wallow in grievance and rumination. America is a positive vision of optimism and ideals. Losers just want to denigrate it and then say “it’s all fake.”
The opening reminded me of the 2004 viral proto-meme mashup, with Bush and Kerry signing a version of This Land is Your Land about that year’s election: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Q-sRdV7SY
What I find frustrating about this argument is that none of these intellectual problems are new. The conflicts between identity politics and liberal universalism were being examined decades ago. Todd Gitlin, Brian Barry, and others were raising these concerns well before 2005. Why is the broader center-left only now seriously confronting arguments that were available all along?
The problem wasn't simply excessive rhetoric or politically disastrous policies. It was the willingness of supposedly serious intellectuals and institutions to accommodate profoundly questionable assumptions about identity, knowledge, power, and moral responsibility without subjecting them to the scrutiny they deserved.
The Woke 1.0 versus Woke 2.0 distinction is just one illustration of this larger failure. Changing rhetoric or abandoning unpopular positions is not the same as recognizing defective reasoning.
What deserves examination is how these ideas acquired such extraordinary moral and institutional authority, why their critics were so often dismissed, and why so many people who professed liberal principles failed to defend them consistently.
I welcome the renewed defense of liberalism, but where is the intellectual accountability? Why did it take political consequences to provoke a reckoning with philosophical problems that were apparent decades earlier? And what evidence is there that the underlying reasoning has actually changed?
I recall something Ross Douthat said once, to the effect that if only weird right wing people talk about something important because everyone else thinks it's racist or sexist or something else bad... then only weird right wing people talk about it.
The reason these people invade and subvert spaces is because they are illiberal. They reject the tolerance and the legitimacy of difference. When they gain access to levers of power they exclude and colonize their organizations. They are not bound by consistent moral principles or standards, they nihilistically use words, accusations, and procedures to dominate.
For a long time normal people didn’t feel comfortable telling these people to shut up. Now we are seeing more of that.
I'm not arguing that anyone owes me anything personally. I'm asking whether intellectuals and institutions that claim authority on the basis of reason, evidence, and liberal principles have a responsibility to examine how they came to endorse ideas they now appear to be abandoning. That's a question of intellectual accountability, not personal entitlement.
Huntington's misidentification about where the clash with Russia would be is a sign of much deeper flaws in the whole concept. There are long standing reasons why Russia feels ambivalent about just being one country in Europe, but those are the same reasons the Germans and the British felt the same way. There's also a deep tradition of authoritarian political organization in Russia, about which there's lots of debate (was it because Ivan the Terrible went nuts? Was it because of the Mongols?) but that's about political institutions not about some aspect of their "civilization".
Similarly, we can see across the Taiwan Strait and across the DMZ that "civilizations" do not determine what alliances or what political organization countries will have.
Yeah, Clash of Civilizations was fundamentally flawed, and it was basically being contradicted as it was being written. Trying to see the world as extremely simplistic blobs like a game of Civilization or something was just never going to result in meaningfully useful things to glean from.
Not the biggest deal in the world, but with respect to the link to "He and this song have long been a target of Native activists and intellectuals", it is a link to an article that literally uses "Indian" right in the headline. That's what most actual American Indians call themselves. Or they will call themselves by their tribe. Some will say "Native American".
The expression "Native", without "American", is another one of those Leftist bits of political correct language that comes from academia just like "Latinx" and which doesn't reflect actual usage on the ground. It's also pretty pernicious-- it's kind of important to say the second word "American" in the locution "Native American" because our indigenous Americans are Americans, a hard won status that required an act of Congress and was not granted as part of the original grant of birthright citizenship. The reason Leftists stopped saying "Native American" is because they hate America and don't think it should exist and don't want to call indigenous Americans "Americans".
My point is I know Matt cares about the way that Leftists have tortured the language for pernicious political reasons, and it's time to start saying "Indian" again. And in any event, "Native" without "American" is a particularly bad thing to say.
Native/indigenous is a generic term applied to such groups who were conquered by technologically advanced powers everywhere in the world. People use the same term to refer to say the Ainu in Japan. It’s meant to be a universalist term.
Adding American depending on context is fine but it kind of feels like insisting we say “ADOS” instead of “black”. Colonialism wasn’t just in America and it’s a bit odd to suggest that similar atrocities didn’t happen elsewhere that left those people disadvantaged in a similar way.
Not true in my experience. I have had to clarify which group I am talking about more than once. Having something different to call the two groups is useful
Actually, no. Growing up, I had to explain to people constantly that I'm Indian-American and not a member of a tribe like the Cherokee. The switch over time to more Americans saying Native American made my life easier. You have no idea what you're talking about
This can't be a novel theory, but did Samuel Huntington start getting into the computer game Civilisation around the time he came up with 'Clash of Civilisations'?
Western tradition has some good things and some not. Namely, democracy is good and imperialism is bad. So it’s telling that Rubio chose to praise Alexander the Great (among other conquerors) who even Victor Davis Hansen (a very MAGA classics professor) has said is best compared to Hitler, rather than say Solon or Pericles or Themistocles or someone along those lines who represents democracy.
When people on the left are anti-Western, it is almost always against the imperialism and not the democracy. Land acknowledgments are a criticism solely of imperialism and not democracy. (And it is not comparable to say that long-dead Native tribes fighting amongst themselves is the same as our current dominant civilization conquering multiple continents in a one-sided romp). If you want to have a broadly popular pro-Western front, one must reject imperialism and focus Western tradition on democracy only.
The war to save the West is definitely worth fighting. Matt's wishful thinking that his Progressives will do the heavy lifting is of a piece with his overall inability to decouple from his incurable partisanship. There several eyes and several motes. Matt lives in denial.
No one seems particularly interested in fighting it though.
Correct.
I am down a rabbit hole re-reading The Clash of Civilizations and related articles -- both positive and negative. In case others might want to follow a similar path, I will share a few links:
The original essay: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1993-06-01/clash-civilizations
Reviews / critics / supporters:
https://newrepublic.com/article/176019/samuel-huntington-clash-civilizations-wrong
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/looking-the-world-in-the-eye/302354/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/opinion/ukraine-clash-of-civilizations.html
https://www.scribd.com/document/1035397134/How-to-Sell-a-Clash-of-Civilizations
It is a real testament to the quality of Huntington's thinking and writing that his framework for analysis still feels relevant and worthy of debate 30+ years later.
One does sort of have to hand it to the Russians both the left's anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism and the right's Reactionary anti-Westernism are significantly intellectually fueled and spread by Russian Hybrid War efforts just across different decades.
The line from Soviet and Fellow travelers thought and at times funding whatever the US does is the problem, only US actions are imperial is obvious. The line, and the money and thought on the current Reactionary anti-Westernism is just as obvious.
The tankie line (that maritime colonial empires are bad but contiguous imperial civilization-states are good) was all too convenient for Russia, being the ultimate land empire that it is.
Krushchev would be weeping at the brilliance of it all.
"Native Americans have much lower household incomes and life expectancies than the American average, with worse educational and labor market opportunities. This is a failure of our national community, and it’s a failure worth trying to rectify."
This statement is absolutely true, and American Indian/Native American issues should be a much higher priority in our national politics than they are.
But speaking this way treats the various indigenous nations as just another American minority group, like Italian Americans or Armenian Americans. But Native Americans aren't simply another minority. They are nations in their own right, with tribal sovereignty. The wellbeing and prosperity of each tribe is not only the responsibility of our national community (tribes have tribal sovereignty, but not full national sovereignty), it is also the responsibility of their national/tribal community.
I think it's worth taking Native American tribes seriously as nations, with rights of self determination like other nations. Taking Native American nations seriously means recognizing them not merely as disadvantaged minority communities within the United States, but as political communities with their own sovereignty, rights, and responsibilities. That doesn't necessarily mean full independence. There are many different models of self determination, whether through independence, or federalism, or autonomous regions, multinational statehood, or tribal sovereignty like we already have. Nations should be able to have some choice in how this relationship looks like. The important thing is to treat Indigenous nations as genuine political communities entitled to meaningful self-government (if they want it), rather than simply as minority populations whose fortunes depend on federal policy.
And I think this requires something of a shift in mindset, including how we understand sovereignty itself. Sovereignty is not just a collection of rights or privileges. It also entails a sovereign mindset: political agency, accountability, and responsibility for the prosperity of one's nation. Indigenous nations should be empowered to exercise that responsibility, and the United States should respect their ability to do so.
This informs how we speak about land acknowledgments. Nations can have deep historical ties to lands that they no longer govern. But this is not sufficient to confer territorial sovereignty, nor should we indulge the idea that it does. We should distinguish between historical and spiritual attachment and legitimate political claims, just as we do with any other nation in the world. Land acknowledgements seek to blur these lines.
I may have commented about this at some point in the past on some post or other, but there often seems to be a strange reluctance to recognize that all the different Native American nations and tribes sometimes warred and drove each other from different pieces of land, and didn't live in peace for all time since the first crossing of the Bering Strait. Go to the museum at the Crazy Horse Memorial, and there's not much about change overtime before the Europeans arrived. Go to Poverty Point, whose inhabitants are long gone with no known modern descendants, and the museum and explanatory videos don't even consider the possibility that the biggest mound, with one narrow entrance from the rear, surrounded by big wooden posts, with a clear view all the way to the river, that no one ever lived on, might have been a fortification, or really anything other than ceremonial.
"While certainly the land was appropriated from people who were already living there, so was all the other land on Earth — including the lands appropriated by Native American groups from the different nations that were living there before they arrived."
Herein lies my uneasy sympathy with the Nakba. In 1946 Poles murdered 42 Jews at Kielce, a third of Germans in the American zone told pollsters the final solution had been necessary, and half still called Nazism a good idea badly carried out. European Jews had to go somewhere, and the Yishuv was willing to take them. Nobody else was.
The problem with the settler impulse is that it becomes addictive. A nation that canonized Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Sharon was certain to breed the irregular settlers who now lynch Palestinians; Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the IDF's Central Command chief, called the 2023 Huwara rampage "a pogrom carried out by outlaws." American founder worship produced filibustering settlers like the defenders of the Alamo, the Bear Flaggers in California, William Walker in Nicaragua, and Narciso López in Cuba.
So the question was never whether Israel's founding was a theft. Every founding was. The question is whether a country can canonize its land-grabbers without spawning land crazed lynch mobs. We could not.
“Every founding was a theft” - this sounds sage but is nowhere close to true and just used to justify the few that actually were.
The reality is that most countries that exist today were founded through decolonization, where the colonial powers left and told the people in certain regions to fend for themselves. While a few of those nations went on to steal land from others, most of them didn’t.
I'm an American and I believe in doing everything possible to help Ukraine. But I strongly support the AfD and I know I would be voting for them if I were a German.
Large-scale Islamic migration to Germany makes it weaker. And a weak Germany will help no one but the Russians. And who knows, maybe the AfD will run to the center on foreign policy after taking over, a la Meloni.
I am probably in the minority around here when I express understanding of why people have voted for Trump 3 times. Similarly I understand why Germans may support AfD. That said, I don't at all understand "strongly" supporting Trump or the AfD. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but it seems counterproductive to what people claim to support. For example, you seem to support Urkaine, but "strongly support" a political party that strongly opposes military and financial support for Ukraine. I don't see why strongly supporting them would send a message to them that they need to change their position on Russia nor would it seem to send a message to other parties that they could early your vote if they change their position on immigration.
Likewise, people can vote for Trump or some other MAGA candidate if their number one issue is a strong border or if you care about trans issues more than anything else. I mean people only have two options typically. But the full throated, near 100% support for all Trump does seems counter productive if people want better options. For example, I am probably going to vote for AES. But I don't strongly support him, don't have yard sign out for him, will not work a phone bank for him, etc. and if he's elected I will let contact his office if he takes positions with which I disagree.
Again, maybe I'm splitting hairs or reading too much into your "strongly support" choice of words. But if we want less extreme parties we can't go around saying we fully and strongly support the more extreme candidates.
The AfD are big fans of Russia and are regularly caught collaborating with the Russians to pursue Russian foreign policy goals. So you are hoping that the Putinversteher will lose an internal battle against the German patriots in the AfD after they are brought to power. What leads you to make this enormous gamble?
I hear ya. I can concretely answer your question, though. What lead me here was repeatedly reading in the news about Islamic terrorists killing Germans at Christmas markets.
On Russia, as I understand it AfD wants to spend Ukraine's aid on Germans instead. Selfish and shortsighted, but not completely illogical. They also want to reopen oil imports from Russia. Considering the pipeline was christened by Angela Merkel, I find the idea that its reopening by the AfD would constitute an unprecedented betrayal of the German people to be a bit rich. Even though I ultimately oppose it.
The AfD are a bunch of commie bootlickers that just couldn't hack being unified with the real Germans
Personally i think it's a good example of the DDR not actually doing denazification very well.
Ehh, its a little overstated how much of an eastern phenomenon AfD is. They are stronger in the east, don't get me wrong, but I think its like an extra ten percent. It'd be like calling MAGA fundamentally a southern thing. Southerners are more MAGA than the rest of the nation, sure, but its not like there's no one north of the Potomac in a little red hat.
Most AfD and die linke support in Germany seems to be coming from a profound dissatisfaction of the status quo by young people (squeezed by poor growth, high taxes, and high costs of living.)
It’s mostly contrarian support from people who feel like they are giving low priority than outsiders and old people.
That is my read. It sucks that these parties are so aligned with Russian imperialism.
My read is that they highest levels of support for the AfD are from middle-aged men (many in the east) who feel left behind by economic, political, and cultural changes since the fall of the Wall. So I think I fundamentally disagree with you. The youth are voting Green.
One thing you can say for a Leftist America hater: there's something honest about burning a flag.
They don't shit on the Constitution while metaphorically sporting a "We The People..." tattoo.
I don't know, i think the work is more important than the stupid fanboy stuff.
It sucks there are vocal people who are so down on America. On the left you have this anti Americanism intellectually laundered and it really just boils down to contrarianism (I am smart because I don’t believe the things dumb people do.)
On the right you have this extreme nihilism. These people embrace arbitrary moral relativism and justify it with “well those people did bad thing or are bad therefore I can act bad.” It has them completely rejecting American values and advocating for monarchism/aristocratic privilege.
Both of these groups really are just embracing loser energy. Like they wallow in grievance and rumination. America is a positive vision of optimism and ideals. Losers just want to denigrate it and then say “it’s all fake.”
The opening reminded me of the 2004 viral proto-meme mashup, with Bush and Kerry signing a version of This Land is Your Land about that year’s election: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Q-sRdV7SY
A time capsule from a different era.
I knew this was JibJab before I even clicked
What I find frustrating about this argument is that none of these intellectual problems are new. The conflicts between identity politics and liberal universalism were being examined decades ago. Todd Gitlin, Brian Barry, and others were raising these concerns well before 2005. Why is the broader center-left only now seriously confronting arguments that were available all along?
The problem wasn't simply excessive rhetoric or politically disastrous policies. It was the willingness of supposedly serious intellectuals and institutions to accommodate profoundly questionable assumptions about identity, knowledge, power, and moral responsibility without subjecting them to the scrutiny they deserved.
The Woke 1.0 versus Woke 2.0 distinction is just one illustration of this larger failure. Changing rhetoric or abandoning unpopular positions is not the same as recognizing defective reasoning.
What deserves examination is how these ideas acquired such extraordinary moral and institutional authority, why their critics were so often dismissed, and why so many people who professed liberal principles failed to defend them consistently.
I welcome the renewed defense of liberalism, but where is the intellectual accountability? Why did it take political consequences to provoke a reckoning with philosophical problems that were apparent decades earlier? And what evidence is there that the underlying reasoning has actually changed?
I recall something Ross Douthat said once, to the effect that if only weird right wing people talk about something important because everyone else thinks it's racist or sexist or something else bad... then only weird right wing people talk about it.
The reason these people invade and subvert spaces is because they are illiberal. They reject the tolerance and the legitimacy of difference. When they gain access to levers of power they exclude and colonize their organizations. They are not bound by consistent moral principles or standards, they nihilistically use words, accusations, and procedures to dominate.
For a long time normal people didn’t feel comfortable telling these people to shut up. Now we are seeing more of that.
Why exactly do you think you're owed anything? And from who?
I'm not arguing that anyone owes me anything personally. I'm asking whether intellectuals and institutions that claim authority on the basis of reason, evidence, and liberal principles have a responsibility to examine how they came to endorse ideas they now appear to be abandoning. That's a question of intellectual accountability, not personal entitlement.
This is the country of never ever admitting you're wrong, grow up. Be happy when people do what you want and stop whining.
Traditionally that's been the work of centuries within fairly narrow sets of people and largely conducted one funeral at a time.
Huntington's misidentification about where the clash with Russia would be is a sign of much deeper flaws in the whole concept. There are long standing reasons why Russia feels ambivalent about just being one country in Europe, but those are the same reasons the Germans and the British felt the same way. There's also a deep tradition of authoritarian political organization in Russia, about which there's lots of debate (was it because Ivan the Terrible went nuts? Was it because of the Mongols?) but that's about political institutions not about some aspect of their "civilization".
Similarly, we can see across the Taiwan Strait and across the DMZ that "civilizations" do not determine what alliances or what political organization countries will have.
Yeah, Clash of Civilizations was fundamentally flawed, and it was basically being contradicted as it was being written. Trying to see the world as extremely simplistic blobs like a game of Civilization or something was just never going to result in meaningfully useful things to glean from.
Not the biggest deal in the world, but with respect to the link to "He and this song have long been a target of Native activists and intellectuals", it is a link to an article that literally uses "Indian" right in the headline. That's what most actual American Indians call themselves. Or they will call themselves by their tribe. Some will say "Native American".
The expression "Native", without "American", is another one of those Leftist bits of political correct language that comes from academia just like "Latinx" and which doesn't reflect actual usage on the ground. It's also pretty pernicious-- it's kind of important to say the second word "American" in the locution "Native American" because our indigenous Americans are Americans, a hard won status that required an act of Congress and was not granted as part of the original grant of birthright citizenship. The reason Leftists stopped saying "Native American" is because they hate America and don't think it should exist and don't want to call indigenous Americans "Americans".
My point is I know Matt cares about the way that Leftists have tortured the language for pernicious political reasons, and it's time to start saying "Indian" again. And in any event, "Native" without "American" is a particularly bad thing to say.
Native/indigenous is a generic term applied to such groups who were conquered by technologically advanced powers everywhere in the world. People use the same term to refer to say the Ainu in Japan. It’s meant to be a universalist term.
Adding American depending on context is fine but it kind of feels like insisting we say “ADOS” instead of “black”. Colonialism wasn’t just in America and it’s a bit odd to suggest that similar atrocities didn’t happen elsewhere that left those people disadvantaged in a similar way.
What your analysis leaves out is that there is an entire country called India.
So what? We can tell from context which Indians we are talking about.
Not true in my experience. I have had to clarify which group I am talking about more than once. Having something different to call the two groups is useful
Actually, no. Growing up, I had to explain to people constantly that I'm Indian-American and not a member of a tribe like the Cherokee. The switch over time to more Americans saying Native American made my life easier. You have no idea what you're talking about
*Bharati-American
This can't be a novel theory, but did Samuel Huntington start getting into the computer game Civilisation around the time he came up with 'Clash of Civilisations'?
It’s more of the reverse from what I have read about Sid Meier.