I'm probably more Keynesian myself
I wouldn't consider myself one now, at least not a classical one, but that's an arcane technical discussion on how to respond to a recession. The short of it is that inflation and unemployment rose and then fell in tandem in the '70s crash, debunking Keynes' theory that they existed as a trade-off with each-other and lending credence to the idea that inflation is a monetary phenomenon instead.
That implies a bit more fiscal responsibility than most of the world practiced in the '70s pursuant to classic Keynesianism. The crash was hardest in areas that followed it the closest, like the Nordic countries. In some ways, it occupies a place for them similar to the Great Recession in the Anglosphere, for all but Iceland which heavily depends on Britain to begin with.
I think the most obvious proof of this is to compare the Russians' performance in WW1 vs. their performance in WW2.
Russia was directly under attack in WW2 though, and the Eastern Front was badly mismanaged by both sides. Hitler was micromanaging the war and pursuing an insane strategy that almost made some of his top generals assassinate him as a threat to Germany (Operation Valkyrie), Stalin had pruned many of his best generals in the purges and was totally unprepared since he for some insane reason trusted Hitler would uphold Molotov-Ribbentrop.
I think both expose the failure of a highly centralized system, so I do view it as systemic. Also looked at in the history of every other overnight utopian "change the world" system, including fascism and earlier Jacobinism, the destruction that the Soviet system caused really fits a consistent pattern. The two go hand-in-hand too. It's hard to change the world overnight without putting it in very centralized hands, which is ripe for abuse of power even aside from atrocities committed in the name of achieving utopia.
Most of it seems to be in the realm of symbolism and the abstract, though.
Equal legal marriage rights and anti-discrimination protections don't seem like "the abstract" to me. They seem like concrete benefits.
That wasn't due to identity politics, though. The reason NYC was such a sewer pit back then was because the local authorities had turned the blind eye to organized crime for so long.
No, organized crime wasn't what got Ed Koch elected. That had been an issue for decades previous as well and was actually much worse in the 1920s-1930s than the 1960s. It was primarily a decade and a half of race-related tensions, mostly but not entirely politically charged crime. The Harlem riot of 1964, the 1968 New York City riot, the Black Panther shootings, and for a non-criminal one: school busing in suburban neighborhoods.
The biggest issue was the massive blackout and subsequent rioting, mostly in minority-majority parts of the city. That's explicitly what carried Koch over the top, over a second term for Beame - which was humiliating since he was primaried out within his own party.
I wasn't thinking about Noel Ignatiev. I was thinking more about Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in the 17th century.
Yeah, what you cited was specifically Noel Ignatiev's interpretation of where the American racial order came from.
His work was influential in historiography, I've met a few historians who take it very seriously, but it's extremely disputed and you can find just as many who see it as trying to fit the square peg of Marxian tabula rasa beliefs into the circle of actual events.
This all changed after Bacon's Rebellion,
From what I can find, it was changing by 1640 actually. John Punch, a black slave, was given a life sentence for attempting to flee - meanwhile, the white indentured servants he fled with only had a few extra years tacked on. Bacon's Rebellion certainly made things worse still, but contra mainly Ignatiev's historiography, it isn't the source of whites and blacks being treated differently in America. It seems to have gotten worse based on ingrained attitudes the slaveholders already had.
Tribalism may be natural, but both whites and blacks in America came from different tribes within their own continent. European immigrants were pushed into assimilating as "white Americans," while inhabitants from Africa were forcibly relocated to America and forced to assimilate as "black Americans." This is where racists argued from the point of view that there was such a thing as "white culture" and "black culture," and it was because of this that they were able to argue for a policy of "separate but equal."
Sure, they all came from different tribes and created two new ethnic identities out of it. But, that's the thing. "White" was a tribe that was formed, based on a mix of shared culture (these were mostly Northwestern European) and genetic proximity relative to black Americans. It wasn't a negation of the trend towards tribal identity, it was creating a new one out of whole cloth to define their group against a perceived out-group.
Unlike white nationalists for example, I don't believe the genetic proximity is necessary for a tribal identity though, just that it's a common basis. Filipinos of a certain generation (ones from before ASEAN membership) tend to identify as closer to Latinos than Asians for example, despite being much closer genetically to Indonesians than to anyone from Latin America. The reason is culture. For a less stark example: I'm considered Nordic, as in Scandinavia et.al., even though the average Finn is genetically closer to Finno-Ugric tribes in Russia than to most Scandinavians. Yet those tribes are Orthodox or pagan, not Lutheran, and tend to have a decent amount in common with tribes from the Urals which the average Finn would see as very foreign.
Cracks in early American white identity, which prompted panic and then either calls to close the borders or assimilation campaigns, seem to have come mainly when cultures that aren't describable as "broadly British-y" arrived. Non-Saxon Germans, and Irish Catholics, first. Then they mostly assimilated, with a bit of their customs being injected into the American mainstream (burgers and being a Plastic Paddy), and the cycle goes on.
(Granted, I know that international Communists supported nationalist liberation movements in the disintegrating colonial world, but it was this contradiction which ideologically compromised the left. If you're anti-nationalist when it comes to Hitler, yet pro-nationalist when it comes to Idi Amin, then you're going to have some serious ideological problems to face.)
I agree with this with regard to Idi Amin specifically, but being anti-colonial subjugation and then also anti-Hitler doesn't strike me as a contradiction in and of itself. Far from it, considering Hitler was a supporter of German colonialism himself in Namibia.
Many new states, when they first form, are fairly authoritarian. Even George Washington clamped down on numerous riots against the new constitutional order. What really signals whether the anti-colonial movement is positive, to me, is whether the change is better than what existed before.
The Algerian independence movement seems like it met that. Controversial in America, but despite the Viet Cong's butcherous war tactics, the Vietnamese one also did. One was fighting against a concerted campaign of cultural genocide ("assimilation" on their home turf), the other against a very brutal imperial regime that was preventing their country from entering the community of nations on an even footing.
I should also add that Idi Amin didn't really lead an anti-colonial movement to begin with. He came to power as a pro-Western dictator, later shifted to a pro-Soviet dictator, in neither case was he really associated with consistent anti-colonial groupings like the Non-Aligned Movement.
We've had calls for violent revolution before. It was a popular topic during the 60s and 70s, but only a few radicals were actually serious about it.
Yeah, I would have been against much of the New Left too.
Like, Ed Koch above? I would have voted for him, since I support weakening (ultimately abolishing) American racial stratification but don't think riots help anyone. Someone with a record of supporting racial integration who also promised a firm response to rioting sounds right up my alley, standing against both the radical left and weak appeasers of it, and a right that wanted to halt integration altogether.
Much of the New Left's work to bring marginalized groups into the American mainstream was positive, and honestly some of Marcuse's arguments about capitalism breeding cultural degradation had merit. But, ultimately I'm against non-necessity-based violent revolution on principle, I think caution about dramatic change is almost always a must, and much of that wing of the New Left seemed to be calling for Maoist-style Cultural Revolution frenzy.
Part of the reason for such catastrophes is due to the fact that the target governments in these revolutions were far too stubborn, intransigent, and greedy to discuss any possibility of compromise or reform. They should have just made a deal before it got to the brink of revolution.
It depends on the circumstances, to me. If the revolutionaries have a legitimate point, and they often do, then I agree. I don't believe that justifies atrocities on their part though, or being worse than what they replace.
Fortunately for those of us in the West, we had more reasonable governments willing to make such deals, compromises, and reforms before it reached the point of violent revolution. The labor movement was becoming a serious force to be reckoned with, but government mediation and support of workers' rights to collectively bargain made it possible for workers to make gains without revolution. To be sure, there was a good deal of strike violence and unrest, but wise leadership prevailed and heeded those warning signs to bring about a better life for the common people.
But ever since the Reagan era, I fear that the ruling class has become more and more intransigent, arrogant, stubborn, and greedy - just like the old Tsarist regime. They haven't gotten as bad (yet), but they do appear to be just as out of touch.
Basically agreed.
That's, frankly, what a lot of the Civil Rights battle was all about.
Kind of. But, in the '50s it was seen as an "elitist Northern Yankee agitator concern." A bare majority of the US public opposed the 1958 Civil Rights Act, Bull Connor's atrocities really were what tipped the scales of public opinion in favor of the 1964 one. But even then, since it was just a bare majority, it was then seen by many in the South as an example of mob rule. Advocates, of course, saw it as exactly the "protecting the rights of minorities" a republican system is designed to uphold over and above what was seen as the South's internal mob rule.
