Jon

@jonparker24.bsky.social

234 Followers 354 Following

The only optimistic wizards fan left

Newt Gingrich, not unexpectedly, had the big picture: You have the Civil War Yankee vote in the mountains; that is still there. It hasn't changed a whole lot. It atrophied slightly, but not much.... You... have a decisive shift of poor southern whites starting with Goldwater, which was essentially a racist reaction combined with the emergence of sort of the first wave of yup-pies—we didn't call them that then... entrepreneurial, wealth, business-oriented... who see the Democratic Party as the party of labor, weak foreign policy, and confusion domestically ... [This] was really not a racist way, combined with the racist reaction
Carver and Herc- The wire
invention and general enlightenment. In Wales, and in the Highlands of Scotland, the boast is made of their pure blood and that they were never conquered, but no man can contemplate them without wishing they had been conquered.
instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of - Life of Frederick Douglass
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation-that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
Finally, intellectuals helped operate seismic emotional shift in which the left was no longer the only recourse for the angry, for those inebriated by dreams of change