Hey, folks! Fireside this week!
And yes, he is on a blanket that is on a cat bed. What you can’t see is that cat bed is on another, different cat bed. My man sleeps in style.
I don’t have a burning topic this week, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m teaching Latin 101 and 102 this semester (and next). One of the things that’s interesting about that is of course students learning vocabulary for the first time tend to learn pretty simple 1-to-1 definitions. That’s necessary and it mostly works just fine: mater is a direct equivalent to “mother,” oculus is a direct equivalent to “eye” and so on. But it gets trickier when you run into common words that are freighted with a lot of cultural meaning, what I’ve started telling my students are major load-bearing cultural value words. Those often have a complex set of definitions and implications with a lot more texture than any Latin 102 student is going to need (or necessarily be ready for).
But I thought here it might be a fun thing to run down some of these major load-bearing cultural value words in Latin that have come up and briefly talk about what they mean and why they’re load bearing. These sorts of big words tend to actually be really common – because they’re really important to the Romans who thus talk about them a lot.1
We should start with the relationship between virtus (virtus, virtutis (m)), honos (honos/honor, honoris (m)), dignitas (dignitas, dignitatis, (f)) and auctoritas (auctoritas, auctoritatis, (f)), words that make a bit more sense understood together. Virtus literally means ‘manliness’ (from vir, viri (m), ‘man’), but by the time the Romans are writing to us its meaning has enlarged beyond that (and it has lost some of its gendered component – women can have virtus as a positive trait). Instead, its core idea is a mix of courage, vigor and strength: ambition, drive and the quality or ability to meet it. Virtus sometimes comes across as a sort of reckless thing which requires ‘constraining virtues’ to control and direct correctly.
Virtus as courage, drive, (positive) ambition compels a person towards the display of their quality in a testing or testing point (a certamen, ‘struggle, strife, testing’ or discrimen, ‘separating, turning-point, decision-point, crisis’). Success in that moment of testing, when witnessed by others (for this is an honor culture: deeds are to be witnessed!) is what produces honos (‘honor, respect,’ but also ‘[political or military] office’ or rewards for honor). Honos (also spelled honor, from where our word comes) is about recognition and acknowledgement and it was a real, visceral thing for the Romans: they describe it as bright and burning.2 A person with sufficient honos required respect from those around them, while a person who was disgraced shrunk back and withered in public (or at least, was supposed to). A sufficient amount of honos produced dignitas (‘dignity, worth, authority’), which demanded respect, almost as a kind of relational forcefield: a person of dignitas required respectful treatment from everyone (including other people of dignitas) because of their achievements. A very large amount of honos produced also auctoritas (‘authority, influence’), a cultural-social demand for deference to the point of being able to direct the actions of others through shear force of honos (the idea being that they do what the man with auctoritas says not because he might threaten them, but simply because his overwhelming achievements and prestige cause them to).3
My students have also met amicitia (amicitia, amicitiae, (f), ‘friendship’) and beneificium (beneficium, beneficii, (n), ‘a favor, service, kindness’)), munus (munus, muneris, (n), service, office, gift) and donum (donum, doni (n), ‘gift’). As you can see, beneficium, munus and donum can all be translated as ‘gift’ but they are not pure synonyms: the shades of meaning are quite different. Donum has the ‘pure’ sense of ‘gift’ in its simple form. By contrast munus derives from the some place as munia (‘duties, official functions’) and so has that sense of an official service or obligation. It can mean a gift as well, often a public gift (that is, the gift of a high official or rich person to the public, like games or public buildings, often in the plural, munera).
Meanwhile you have beneficium, literally a ‘good making’ or ‘good deed’ (bene+facio, ‘a good doing’) the word is tied up with amicitia and patrocinium. The patron-client relationship which is so prominent in Roman society, consists in the exchange of beneficia (‘favors’) and officia (sing. officium, ‘service’)4 between two reciprocal but unequal parties. The difference is that an officium is a service done to one who is owed (by position or by previous favors) while a beneficium is a service or favor done to one who is not (yet) owed, but necessary in both words is the idea that these favors are given willingly, typically as part of a continuing relationship.
Now at Rome5 while patron-client relations were everywhere, between freeborn men, it was almost never appropriate to say so out loud. That would shame the junior party and as we’ve just seen honos matters a lot in this society: a good patron wouldn’t even want to so diminish their client. So the near-universal practice was instead to refer to patronage (patrocinium, clientela) relationships in terms of amicitia, ‘friendship.’ Consequently, while amicitia could be the relationship between you and your drinking buddies, it was also the public term for patronage relationships and for political alliances (many of which were effectively patronage relationships). So it does mean ‘friendship’ but covers a wider array of unequal relationships that involve the exchange of officia and beneficia.
And then you have the age-and-gender words. At the moment, my students have something of an incomplete set: they have puer (puer, pueri (m), ‘boy’) and puella (puella, puellae (f), ‘girl’) and iuvenis (iuvenis, iuvenis (m/f but usually m), ‘young men/women’), but not yet adulescens (adulescens, adulescentis, (m), ‘youths, yutes‘). They have vir (vir, viri (m), ‘man’), homo (homo, hominis (m/f but usually m), ‘human, male’) and femina (femina, feminae (f), ‘female’) but not yet mulier (mulier, mulieris (f), ‘woman’).
And you can actually learn a fair bit about a culture by looking at their age-and-gender words, because it tells you something about their categories.
We start with puer and puella, matching words for ‘boy’ and ‘girl.’ Except, note quite matching. There is, I should note, a fair bit of ‘give’ in the system I’m about to lay out, so take these as general rules, not an iron system. A puer stops being a puer around 14 or 15 when he received from his father the toga virilis (‘toga of manhood’) and is thus recognized as coming of age, at which point he’s an adulescens, ‘a youth.’ By contrast, puella is not an age-limited category, but essentially means ‘a girl pre-marriage’ (it can also be a term of affection for a romantic partner or at least a prospective one later in life), so generally marriage is the event that marks the transition from puella to uxor and mulier. Notably, adulescens can be used of women, but is only very rarely so.
For young men, adulescens is a ‘younger adult’ category while iuvenis is the ‘young (but less so)’ category. There’s a lot of blurring here, rather than a hard age break, but typically adulescentes are in their teens or early twenties while iuvenes are young men from their twenties through their thirties (so yes, a 35 year old man, in Roman thought, is still a ‘youth’). The next category up was senex (senex, senis, ‘old man, elder’)), the plural of which seniores declined the Roman census age classes 46 and up (and thus mostly out of military age).
Meanwhile, you have homo and femina, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – Latin is absolutely a male-normative patriarchal language, so homo can mean both ‘man’ as distinct from ‘animal’ (and thus include all of humankind) but also ‘male’ as distinct from ‘female’. I tend to think of these words as more like ‘male’ and ‘female’ in that both can have a bit of a sneer to them: you don’t call someone you like a homo for the same reason that the newscaster reporting on, “three adult males were spotted leaving the scene” is not saying a nice thing about those three fellows.
Thus you have vir – man, as distinct from mere ‘male’ – a term of a bit more respect. Its nearest match for women is mulier (an adult woman, regardless of married status, though in Rome this is going to mostly mean widows and divorcees along with wives; never-marrieds are really rare in Roman culture). Mulier doesn’t quite carry the status that vir does – vir has real weight and is the root behind virtus. Instead, the weightier word here is matrona (matrona, matronae (f), matron, married woman, wife) which from a very early point has a sense of dignity and even social rank and so carries something closer to vir‘s sense of ‘gentleman’ with something like ‘lady,’ though honestly with even a bit more intensity (matrona can do the work for women that, in the republic, something like, ‘eques Romanus‘ “a Roman of the equestrian order” meaning “a Roman of wealth and status” does for men.). The fact that matrona derives from mater (‘mother’) also suggests something about Roman values and exactly what things get what sort of person status.
In any case, as a historian I often find I wished introductory Latin textbooks offered a bit more of this sort of thing here, taking the opportunity as they introduce those major load-bearing cultural value words to explain a little bit how they fit into the broader culture, but relatively few language textbooks do. I find I wish students learned a bit more Roman culture in Latin classes – at least compared to what I got – but then, of course, I am a historian, so I would.6
On to Recommendations:
The first story here is a bit of a bummer, but worth noting. I’ve been writing here about the jobs crisis in history and academia more broadly for some time, noting that it was a case of the system flooding, as it were, from the bottom up: lower ranked graduate programs became wholly non-competitive in a shrinking job market before the crisis impacted highly ranked programs (quite regardless of the quality of the historians involved, I might note). Well, the flooding has at last reached the upper-most decks: Harvard is cutting graduate programs across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by anywhere from 50 to 75%. History graduate admissions there will plunge from 13 annually to just 5, and the cuts extend into the sciences as well, with a 75% reduction in Biology, for instance.
I know a lot of folks read this blog to escape contemporary politics, but I feel the need to note that this is a policy choice: it is the immediate result of the current administration’s war on higher education, which will make college both more expensive and less available and also worse as an education. But it is also the long-term result of a steady erosion in policy support of higher education, of substituting state funding with private loans, over decades. This was not the product of impersonal economic forces but rather remains the product of intentional political choices and we could chose differently (and indeed, did so in the past).
Meanwhile, I wrote – behind a paywall, alas – my take on the recent gathering of US general officers at Quantico for The Dispatch. I won’t rehash that here, but as I suppose many of you have guessed, I found very little to like, a lot to dislike and a bit to fear about the speeches given there, both of which represented stark breaks with the most successful parts of the American military tradition. Subsequent reporting has suggested the audience probably agreed. I remain profoundly concerned that the United States is careening in remarkably dangerous directions, but then I was suggesting this was the road the president would take us on, and he has.
Meanwhile, in ancient history, we have another Pasts Imperfect! Stephanie Wong writes briefly about the tradition of pumpkin carving, which is actually a tradition of turnip carving, because it originated before the pumpkin arrived in the Old World. The post also highlights the amazing “Braille for Ancient Languages” project, topical blogs by Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell, and more! Well worth a look, as always.
Finally, for this week’s Book Recommendation, I’ want to recommend I’m going with a military history recommendation, J.A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army: 1610-1715 (1997). Giant of the Grand Siècle fits into a category of military history that take a single army – the army of a single state in a single period – and attempt to describe it as an organization and an institution. Reading such an approach is really valuable for the student of military history looking to move beyond mere biography or campaign history to begin to understand not just war and warfare in a period.7 Lynn’s time period is especially interesting because it covers the beginning of the trend towards institutionalization: the creation of regular systems of inspection, standardization of uniforms, regularization of pay, the first fumbling steps towards standard training for officers and so on.
Lynn provides here a portrait – a snapshot in many respects (although in individual sections he notes clearly change over time) – of the French army of the 1600s and early 1700s, when France was the premier military power in Europe. The picture will be in some ways somewhat familiar – there are captains and colonels, companies and regiments – but at the same time strikingly alien to someone familiar with modern, post-institutionalization militaries. Commands of companies and regiments were still purchased (for the most part), their officers mostly aristocrats with years in service but little formal military education, with the expectation that captains and especially colonels would employ a significant portion of their aristocratic wealth to raising and maintaining the units they commanded. Officers still raised entire units at their own expense, while fraud in payments (officers pocketing the wages of non-existent or dead soldiers) was still a commonplace.
Rather than proceeding chronologically (which would have been terribly confusing) Lynn proceeds topically, beginning with administration (pay, logistics, taxes, lodgings), then command (officers, their background, training and culture), then life for the rank and file soldiers, and then finally closing with a discussion on the practice of war itself.8 The focus here is on institutions and organizational structures (how are units structured, who pays for what, how are men trained, who comes from what background, what royal officials are present and what can they do, etc.), not on individual battles or units or even the experience of combat. That may seem boring – and at times the book can be very dry – but it can be fascinating to dive into such a large and complex organization and try to understand how it works.
For someone looking to move beyond the surface level understanding of military history, I think ti is essential to read these sorts of treatments widely, across as many kinds of militaries as possible, in as many time periods as possible, to begin to get a sense of how different militaries behave as institutions, because each one is different.
And that’s it for this week! Next week, a surprise because I am not allowed to tell you about it yet.
- The bespoke department textbook I am working from is fastidious in its effort to introduce the most common vocabulary first, which nearly all words drawn from the 300-or-so most common Latin words. Most textbooks are a little more willing to introduce a few less-common (but my no means rare) words to make it easier to put together assignment sentences or short passages.
- On this, see C.A. Barton’s Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (2001).
- On the interaction of honos, dignitas and auctoritas, see Lendon, Empire of Honor (1997).
- etymology: opus+facio, ‘a work made’
- “Romae” – Latin students everywhere – what case is that?
- One thing I’ve tried to do is bring in a bit more ‘real Latin,’ – particularly inscriptions – to give a sense of what this language was used for beyond literary production.
- A similar work on the Georgian Navy, N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World (1986) seems like it will probably get a spot on a fireside one day too, even if it is getting a bit venerable.
- Of these, I wonder if the last won’t see revisions as the changes in our understanding of how rigid combat was percolate backwards historically, as see with, for instance, A.S. Burns, Infantry in Battle: 1733-1783 (2025).
I feel it’s seasonally appropriate to mention that the “wer” in ‘virtus’ and the “ver” in ‘werewolf’ are the same PIE root.
I could make an argument that “werewolf” just means a really virtuous wolf.
It would be inaccurate in several fully-independent ways, but it could be fun.
Uplifted wolf?
Aware wolf?
Wokewolf?
You’re quite mistaken. Otherwise how could we have a bit of dialogue like:
“Werewolf?”
“There wolf!”
Meaning that “female werewolf” is a contradiction. If you need to refer specifically to Women Living With Lycanthropy (WLWL) the term would be “wifwolf”.
Uh – uh – Roma, Romae, Romae, Romam, Roma…No Good Dinosaurs Are Alive…from context it’s location information not ownership, so…dative case? 😅
Technically it’s locative, although that’s rarely taught since in Classical Latin it was submerged into dative.
Thanks, I was thinking “locative” but a quick google did not even turn up a reference to the locative case. Clearly I am speaking an out-of-date Latin.
Looks like it descended from Indo-European and is present in a lot of European languages today, including Slovak and Ukrainian, as well as in non-IE languages like Uzbek and Cree.
the wikipedia indicates that it was present in Old Latin but gradually disappeared because sound shifts led to its merging with other cases. Except for a few important words and place names, where the locative got ‘fixed’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_case
That’s interesting, the way we were taught back in school, Latin didn’t even “have” locative. Curious to find out that at some point it apparently did.
And the submerging makes a whole lot of sense to me. My own mother tongue does technically distinguish in its grammar between dative and locative, but outside of context or without a preposition, it’s literally impossible to tell them apart (as in, if you just wrote the local equivalent of “Romae” outside of a sentence, it’s not possible to say whether that’s dative or locative). So I always found it a bit silly to classify locative as a separate case, instead of just a use case of dative. Which would be quite useful for a language that already has too many of the bloody things
I didn’t think I’d live to see the day where classic Monty Python references were not recognised on the internet…
“Dative [centurion draws sword] Ah! oo! oo! Not the dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! The … accusative! Accusative! Ad domum, sir, ad domum!” “Except that domus takes the …?” “The locative!” “Which is?” “Domum!” “Domum.”
JOHN CLEESE: (draws sword)
DANIEL BERKE (panicking): Locative! It’s the locative!
Which women – or perhaps I should ask what kinds of women – do the sources credit with having virtus? And for what sort of actions?
To quote our host when he previously discussed this on Twitter:
“Cornelia (mother of the Gracchi) has virtus (Juv. 6.166-9), Cicero’s wife Terentia has virtus (Cic. Ad. Fam. 14.1.1) as does his daughter (Cic. Ad. Fam. 14.11 – summa virtute, no less! the utmost virtus!). So the actually important value, the one the Romans care about (again, virtus) isn’t about ‘testosterone’ but about courage, energy and drive – and good Roman women can have it too” (4 Jan 2024)
I’m not a student of Latin, but I am a fan of Doctor Who. I recently watched “The Daemons,” a story from the 1970s featuring Jon Pertwee as The Doctor. I thought you might be amused by the fact that at one point he is presented to the superstitious villagers as “the great wizard qui quae qoud.”
“Shrank” not “shrunk.”
Correct spelling is an anachronism!
On a more substantive note, time spent learning about Roman culture is time spent not learning Latin. Latin was used for many purposes through a long period of time, and learning what virtus meant to a Roman in 100 BC won’t help with Queen Elizabeth I’s epitaph.
The great majority of surviving written Latin is more or less consciously modeling itself on the Latin of that 100 BC Roman, though. (The exceptions would mostly be the Latin of, oh, 200AD to 800AD, sufficiently far away from Caesar to have markedly different cultural assumptions, but with a sufficiently similar spoken vernacular to have their written language be a different register but not a different language).
I would say that the majority of later written Latin is modeling itself on the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the late Republic/early Principate, but not on its culture. The Elizabethans (this is just an example) may have written in Latin, but their ideas about religion, morality, governance, family structure, social hierarchy, military strategy, etc. had little in common with that earlier period.
Teaching the idea that translation isn’t a mapping exercise where you just switch words in for each other 1:1 is worth that slight reduction in the amount of vocabulary you cover.
Pretty much this, despite what machine translation has mislead many to believe, translation is neither a science nor a simple mechanical act. It’s an art, and to do well requires a deeper understanding than a bare dictionary definition or two line summary of it’s connotations can convey. This is a subject of ongoing debate in the anime community because there’s a faction of ill educated chuckleheads who accuse translators of “changing the meaning” when they don’t translate by switching words 1:1.
And as I’ve said before, I often encounter trouble translating from Submarine (or Navy) to English. Not only are the dictionary definitions often different, there’s a whole *host* of cultural assumptions/background/baggage as well.
Allan Bloom, in the introduction to his translation of the Republic, takes somewhat the opposite view.
For convenience, I will summarize his argument as I recall it, but if you disagree, please read him and engage with his actual argument, not the following sentence. Plato, like all great philosophers, was a literary artist who chose his words carefully, and if he uses the same word in different places, he means for both passages to resonate with each other in some fashion, and for the meaning of that word to emerge from the totality of its uses, an effect which is lost if you don’t always use the same English word to translate the same Greek word.
So the particular thing I’m taking aim at is a “naive” approach to translation, which treats it as a mechanistic process where each word has a meaning and you just slot in the word with the corresponding meaning and then you’re done. This is extremely incorrect and people trying to learn other languages need to have this notion corrected ASAP.
What Allan Bloom is arguing for is a lot more sophisticated and nuanced. There are good reasons to try to consistently use a specific word when making a translation if you want to preserve those sorts of resonances – but there are also cases where it’s actively impossible, and cases where doing it will preserve some of the original meaning but obscure other parts. How to resolve this is one of the key judgement calls of the translator of a work.
Yep, translation is an art, not a science, and there can even be very different decisions made in translating the same text that are both justifiable because they aim to preserve or well…. translate, different aspects of the original.
Crucial takeaway: If Madoka grew up instead of [14.5-year-old anime spoilers], she’d be Mulier Magi Madoka Magica. Or perhaps Matrona Magi Madoka Magica.
…or Femina Magi Madoka Magica, but that’s not alliterative.
I guess the other foreshadowing is that Magi will ever be Puella. They’ll never be Mulier or Matrona because [14.5-year-old anime spoilers]. Then again other spinoff especially the Joan of Arc one have quite old “Puella”s.
I don’t want to say you’re wrong, but magical girls that do get to grow up are still mahou shojou, not mahou josei.
TL Note: “Shojou” is Japanese for “puella,” and “josei” is Japanese for “mulier”. Kinda.
Well by old here I mean either 60 years old or >100. A bit off compared to the main series, but then again the series itself established that major historical events are Kyubey’s fault.
https://wiki.puella-magi.net/Isabeau_de_Bavi%C3%A8re
https://wiki.puella-magi.net/Pernelle_Flamel
The genre convention is that aging mahou shoujo remain ‘shojou’ because it is a form of not growing up. This does not trap magical girls in a choice between death and stasis: instead, they advance via apotheosis.
Indeed!
That’s true in one sense, but it’s usually not true in the sense that it was true for Madoka.
Reading article about Roman formation and the need to stay tight in phalanx, I’m immediately reminded of Islamic mass prayer that looks suspiciously similar. And they do it 5 times a day. Is there actual connection to this and is there any other religion that do so?
> more expensive and less available and also worse as an education
I give you the latter ones, but I guess it’s already as expensive as it can be. If the war on higher education is actually good, it should also reduce credentialism and lots of other factors that blow the education cost sky high. But regardless of good intention, they certainly pave a road to hell instead.
Which article would that be? Previously on this blog, I think phalanx has been used to refer exclusively to the Hellenistic sarissa formation. The Roman legion, in contrast, was much more widely spaced (relatively loose rather than tight so to speak?)
I guess technically this article talks about Roman formation AND phalanx, but not together. So in memory it’s mixed. Still the “close order” formation looks similar.
https://acoup.blog/2023/12/15/collections-shield-walls-and-spacing-hollywood-mobs-and-ancient-tactics/
>it should also reduce credentialism and lots of other factors that blow the education cost sky high.
I agree, while I understand our host’s pain, I believe much higher eduction’s troubles have been brought on by the education admins themselves. Inflating tution, lowering standards, and increased politization have led people to feel increasingly less sympathetic to their plight.
Lowering standards? That’s a very vague assertion.
If we look at undergraduate co-authorship of research papers for example, that’s on the uptick! More and more students are getting involved in research earlier, which definitely suggests an improved crop of students!
Does it? Or does it suggest lowered standards? (I have no idea what the truth is here, but just the basic “more students are co-authoring research papers” can also mean “more students are doing shoddy research before they are ready”)
Increased undergraduate co-authorship of research papers doesn’t say much about the average students. It’s like citing starting salaries for AI researchers to say average wages are improving.
The Atlantic article about students who have trouble reading several books a semester suggests a lower quality of students.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Sheesh, we used to have reading assignments for several books a week.
“Increased politization” [sic] meaning… What exactly?
Meaning “Changes that I don’t like”?
I mean, I think the problem is real, it’s just usually framed in the wrong way.
Yeah. Most times when I’ve seen someone say “academia has become less popular because of politicization,” what they turn out to mean is “twenty years ago, the nice talking heads on the TV started affirming that when it comes to a bunch of important topics, I’m right and college professors are wrong, and not only wrong but actively plotting to destroy America with their wrongness by subverting the youth to believe in things like global warming and equal rights for women and the germ theory of disease, and I want all those professors to stop doing that!”
Do you mean, how is increased politicization defined? As increases in universities’ manifestation of institutional positions on controversial positions, such as abortion, police funding, transgender sports participation etc. Or do you mean, how is its manifestation quantified? For instance, the ratio of conservative to liberal Supreme Court justices invited to speak at Harvard Law School.
I think that’s sort of a disingenuous question. Our host favorably noted this article a while back. https://scholars-stage.org/the-fall-of-history-as-a-major-and-as-a-part-of-the-humanities/. Neither Bret nor anyone else responded to Greer’s statement about “The History professoriate tilting hard to the Left, and regularly engaging in Left-wing polemics on social media . . . .” by saying “What is that ignorant buffoon talking about?” Why not?
Because to Tanner, that’s not the main issue. He believes the main reason for the decline in history majoring in the United States is that the gut majors have shifted from English and history to economics, psychology, and political science; he explains this as part of a shift in middlebrow national discourse from humanities to quantitative methods. It’s not about left ideology, because social science professors lean left too, including economists.
The “left-wing polemics on social media” issue is something Bret has commented about. He distinguishes outreach from activism. Outreach is most of the blog posts here, explaining military history, Roman social and political history, and military realism in SF/F to a broad audience. Activism is rare on this blog but does exist (like the “is Trump a fascist?” post); other historians, Bret notes, engage in a lot more activism and a lot less outreach, defined practically as outreach increasing the discipline’s political capital and activism spending it down.
You’re not answering my question. Obviously the politicization of history departments wasn’t Greer’s main point: the fact that it was a throwaway line only shows that, in fact, everybody knows it’s a fact. But nobody, including Brett, raised their hand and said, “What on earth is Greer talking about?” Why not, unless the denial of university politicization in this thread is wholly disingenuous? That’s the question.
Because “professors are overwhelmingly liberal and talk about politics on social media” is not really politicization.
On issues of actual import to activism, there’s no politicization. For example, I find myself having to deal with the fact that there’s no college class teaching writing for activists, going over how to write for different audiences (fundraisers, general public, state and local political staffers, media wonks, etc.); the Effective Transit Alliance has had to figure this out from experience. So they’re not trying to train activists or anything like that – they’re trying to train historians and also running their mouths on social media.
Being aware of a narrative does not mean that it is true, nor worth addressing in every instant.
@ey81,
I was hoping the comment about politicization would get ignored, since we talk about politics enough here, but it didn’t, so oh well. Like I said, I think the problem is real, but it’s often misleadingly described.
1) Most of American academia, at least in public universities, are very politically lopsided right now, and this is true (maybe to a lesser degree) of the professional-managerial class more generally.
2) I think this is a big problem, both because it makes it harder to dispassionately identify the truth, because it discredits the academic establishment among the population, because it makes conservative governance a lot dumber and less functional when they do get into office, and finally because i *disagree* substantively with liberals on a lot of issues.
3) That said, it’s not really a left or right issue, it’s about *liberalism*. There are a lot of left wing ideological viewpoints that I don’t think are in any way common on US universities- it would likely be rare to find a Communist or a Black Nationalist or an environmental-primitivist.
4) There are also a lot of Christian colleges and universities in the US, who have their own, entirely different, ideological perspectives and will ‘cancel’ you for entirely different things (as is their right). If you’re searching for academic job ads, even in the hard sciences, it’s not hard to find ads where they specify you have to be broadly supportive of a “Reformed Christian” or “Lutheran Church Missouri Synod” perspective, etc.. I don’t know if most of the faculty at these places is necessarily conservative or Republican, probably not, but I’d hesitate to assume they’re ‘liberal’ either.
5) I don’t know how you solve the problem, but I think it has to begin with people on all sides having more epistemic humility and being willing to question their own ideological values, at least to some degree, and to recognize that people on the other side might have some good points. Hiring more people with heterodox political opinions is where you end the process, not where you start it. I’m not convinced that current Republican proposals are going to anything to solve the deeper issue.
6) Finally, in a lot of ways today’s US Republican party seems to be doing everything it can to alienate itself from academics and educated people, with its embrace of global warming deniers, creationists, vaccine skeptics, trashing the environment, conspiracy theories about “seed oils”, and so forth. These aren’t questions of values, they’re questions of fact. And I say that as someone who is generally fairly distrustful of the professional-managerial class and its interests and is very unhappy with how US politics has become polarized around educational lines (and other things, but education is certainly a part of it).
Hector:
I agree with almost everything you write here.
The politization of public discourse in America, where people are being funneled into complete media environment to the degree that people of differing political alignment experience entirely separate media realities, is incongruent with an academia that largely sees itself as committed to the truth and the overall common good of humanity.
Like how no one actually wants to study the military for its own sake because leftists have taken over the field of military history and they think studying the army is for warmongers. No, seriously, that’s half of the foreword for this week’s book recommendation.
On tuition, our host has touched on it in his fireside friday about grant funding, in addition to the overall scenario of the financial side of education. He also agrees that mismanagement has led to it as well, or at least played a role.
https://acoup.blog/2025/02/14/fireside-friday-february-14-2025-on-grant-funding/
These aren’t hard problems. There were two major sources of funding for Universities when they were being developed: noblesse oblige and direct state subsidy. The former persists somewhat, but is less of a social expectation and has far more targets than it used to (including a massive expansion in the ‘legally apolitical’ political nonprofit space). The latter diversified to expand tuition and tuition loan subsidies, disguising funding cuts that have proceeded year-on-year for almost three generations now.
Schools have had to massively retool towards fundraising to replace what was lost, and that requires a professional corps of administrators because convincing students that regular tuition and fee hikes are worth it is a real job.
But to my point, when you take money out of a system and it stops working as well as it was before, it’s actually easy to spot the problem.
In math, standards are not at all lowered. Grade inflation comes from ever-rising standards that students meet. For one example, I saw a story (maybe on Bluesky?) of a professor who, visiting Harvard on sabbatical, gave the same test that he was used to giving from his usual class, normed for non-elite students. The mean grade on that test was 99%. That cued him to make the final exam in the class much harder, to meet standards.
That is my experience attending Columbia today, 44 years after my previous undergraduate experience. The work is hard and the students are smart and do the reading (or write the programs, learn the irregular verbs, etc.). The grading, however, is easy. Also, my niece, who attends RPI, commented that the Intro Comp Sci exam at Columbia, which I sent her, was harder than it would have been at RPI.
Yeah, the grading at Columbia is very generous, and at least as of when I was there (2006-11) there was no attempt to rein in grade inflation the way there was at Princeton.
Columbia math is also weird in that a) the calc sequence there is abnormally slow (most universities do it in three semesters and MIT does it in two, but Columbia takes four), but b) the core modern algebra and analysis courses are very rigorous and do each in two semesters what my R1-esque undergrad institution did in three to four, and the more advanced students take grad courses in third year of undergrad. So the norm is that a solid majority of students in the courses for the majors get As but they have to work for it.
Probably not productive to turn this into a discussion of Columbia grading policy, led by one guy who was there 10 years ago and another who is a part-time post-bacc. No doubt, Columbia has a demanding curriculum, softer in some spots than other top-tier universities, tougher in others. But putting all that aside, my more general point was that I detect no diminution in standards over the past 40+ years, based on first-hand experience at two different Ivy institutions, an experience which almost no other commentator can match.
Why does Islamic mass prayer look suspiciously similar to Roman formations and the need to stay tight in a phalanx? The only thing they have in common is that there are a lot of people, things shared by convention-goers, crowds, and sports fans at the sporting event.
Well they have to stay tight horizontally, keep space to people at front/back, and keep neat rows. I think lots of crowds is more chaotic, unless they’re marching. Even then they’re still less tidy. I imagine if at those mass prayers everyone is holding shield and spear, it’ll look indistinguishable to phalanx.
They’re organized because it’s a ritual. They’re in a square formation because that’s a really basic way to organize a bunch of people.
That’s actually the main part of my questions. If it’s such a basic formation, why haven’t I seen it more. The other one brought up churches, but that’s exactly the one other example I have noticed, and nowhere else.
Catholic Christian mass is exactly like this with the sole exception that people are being seated on benches.
If you’ve only got the 300 most common words, oof. That will mean a lot of the sentences will be more weird than even Up Goer Five.
As someone who never voted for Trump, if he peacefully leaves office at the end of his term, will you say either here, on X, or on Bluesky that you are happy to be wrong about where you think he’s headed, or will you be completely silent, or still put a negative spin on it?
Ha! If you think for a minute that trump is EVER going to leave office except in a pine box, you have sadly deluded yourself, or are not paying attention, or are part of the problem.
We are living in an age of a mad emperor, and when we have a horse named as a senator, I won’t be surprised one bit. Wait for it.
Given how he eventually surrendered to Joe Biden, and has responded to each court challenge to his decisions by going through the process (albeit grudgingly), and there will be no election of his to contest after this term is up, I’m optimistic. Again, I didn’t vote for Trump in any of the elections he ran in, but I don’t think he’s near as scary as the left has made him out to be, except in the sense that the madder they get, the stronger he gets. I’ll meet you back here after Jan. 6th, 2028. If he came up with some stupide reason not to step down, I’ll eat my words. If he leaves office like every other president who’s terms have expired, I hope you and Prof. Devreaux will have the integrity to eat yours.
And if he forces a Constitutional amendment through his bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court that allows him an additional term, or just declares a state of emergency that suspends elections for its never-to-end duration, well before that date, will you eat your words then? Or will you be too busy celebrating? I think we both know what the answer is.
“And if he forces a Constitutional amendment through his bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court that allows him an additional term”
Either you phrased this extraordinarily poorly, or you need to learn a lot more about how American politics works before you decide to comment on it. SCOTUS is not involved in the Constitutional amendment process in any way, shape, or form.
60guilders, SCOTUS has in the past simply declared that certain parts of the Constitution don’t apply to specific issues, even when a reasonable reader would assume they do. The Constitution is not self-enforcing, and it should be expected that the Justices that prevented States from using the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from their ballots would also rule that the 22nd Amendment is somehow unclear enough to apply against him.
I think we should assume that @Chris Davies was writing in a hurry, because while they are technically wrong, they are not meaningfully wrong.
Endymionologist: “it should be expected that the Justices that prevented States from using the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from their ballots would also rule that the 22nd Amendment is somehow unclear enough to apply against him.”
Given that Trump v. Anderson was a 9-0 decision on whether a state could determine eligibility for federal office, I don’t think that decision is grounds to claim that the court would somehow decide that the 22nd Amendment would not apply to Trump.
“and there will be no election of his to contest after this term is up, I’m optimistic.”
the US constitution means whatever the bright boys on the Supreme Court says it means, so if they want him to run again, he can run again.
He also doesn’t actually need to run again, he can just keep sitting in the Oval Office and refusing to acknowledge the results of an election. He could also just run Melania as a dummy candidate, as numerous people have done before him.
I’m not really a betting man, but I would bet you a small amount of money that he won’t consensually step down in 2029 (although I guess some discussion would be needed to hash out the exact terms).
If he gets Melania to run for president, I will count that as a third Trump term, and I won’t vote for her, unless she divorced him before the election. By the same token, I wouldn’t have voted for Hillary Clinton even if I agreed with her on everything, for the sole reason that the Clinton couple already had their two terms.
“He also doesn’t actually need to run again, he can just keep sitting in the Oval Office and refusing to acknowledge the results of an election. He could also just run Melania as a dummy candidate, as numerous people have done before him.”
Presidency is confined to native-born citizens, so actually he couldn’t do that. Unless a court decided that she was native-born. But the main barrier is that in countries where the wife succeeds the husband there’s an assumption that the wife will actually remain loyal to the interests of the clan. Dubious in this case.
@ajay,
But the main barrier is that in countries where the wife succeeds the husband there’s an assumption that the wife will actually remain loyal to the interests of the clan. Dubious in this case
Fair point. I was thinking about George Wallace in Alabama, but to be fair, that was in the late 1960s and gender expectations in America then were different than they are now.
(it also didn’t work as planned since she had cancer and died like a year into her term).
It’s far from certain his body would even last until 2028. Having said that, it’s worth noting that a sitting Senator has already spoken of “going around the Constitution”.
https://www.al.com/politics/2025/10/tuberville-says-trump-could-go-around-the-constitution-for-a-third-term-in-2028-thats-up-to-him.html
You came here to throw passive-aggressive, and eventually aggressive insults with a thin veneer of sympathy. We don’t want you back.
Speak for yourself.
Fair. But I’m not attacking our host like that guy.
And while we’re at it, the right wing have made me the way I am by their insults and abuse, yet I’m not permitted to retaliate? What a double standard.
I want a world where people are kind to each other and they are obstacles to it. Mary Catelli and ey81 and even you at times. How am I supposed to not snap when you are all like this?
Trying to be kind when people around you are not gets you killed like Martin Luther King Jr. You do not get to demand I let myself get brutalized and killed by calling me out on being unkind to cruel people.
Am I breaking Bret’s rules now?
Obvious typo is obvious. Point is that you and people who share your views have made being kind to others a gateway to a painful and brutal death. Yet I’m asked to be kind to others anyway?
That’s also asking me to commit suicide.
What insults, aggressive or otherwise, have I thrown? I haven’t called anyone names, or accused anyone here of lying or not arguing in good faith. I’ve sought to keep my tone civil and my emotions in check.
I see from your comment below that you interpreted my challenge to our host as an attack. I put out that challenge because while I do enjoy most of Prof. Devreaux’s work here, (and also acknowledge that he too has been civil in his political thoughts) he has continuosly weighed on political matters while scarcely engaging with those who disagree. By contrast, he goes back and forth quite a bit with those who disagree on historical matters. It’s his choice of course; I’m not saying he HAS to acknowledge anybody on anything, But it’s my humble opinion that his credibility would be improved if he were to either engage more in the political discussions he starts, or not bring up politics at all if he’d rather not do that kind of engagement.
And why should I extend trust to you?
I usually don’t get involved in the political arguments in the comments of this blog, but it’s particularly ironic that you’re making these claims today given that on Thursday this week, Steve Bannon (one of Trump’s close cronies) was openly asserting in an interview with the Economist that “Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that”.
Indeed!
I will do my best to keep to the minimum of civility needed to avoid a banning from this blog, but the fact is that the enemy desires hell on earth and kindness is literally impossible to give to others now unless one wants to die like Martin Luther King Jr.
And I don’t want to do that.
I do find that disturbing, and I hope his vague statement about unveiling their plan “when the time comes” is blowing smoke.
Although I agree that Bannon’s comment is disturbing, I note that the US has not annexed Canada, or removed the population of Gaza, or ended the conflict in Ukraine, or done a hundred other things that have been talked about. This is not an administration which keeps its fantasies private.
I note that the US has not annexed Canada, or removed the population of Gaza, or ended the conflict in Ukraine,
@ey81,
your comment about annexing Canada kind of proves the point here. In my opinion, the norm about “don’t annex or threaten to annex foreign countries” is a lot bigger and more consequential than the norm about not running for a third term, for some of the reasons Bret has fleshed out previously on this blog, and it also dates from about the same time (immediately post WWII). If Donnie has already cheerfully violated the bigger norm at least three times, I don’t see any reason to doubt that he would violate the smaller one.
If he peacefully leaves office at the end of his term, that’ll be a first for him.
Even if he were to peacefully leave office, he will have left a deep and dark mark on our nation. Plus he and his adherents will continue to lie about elections and everything else under the sun.
I don’t think Donnie is ever going to voluntarily step down, but I’d be delighted to be proven wrong. I’ve certainly been proven wrong before, many times.
People like you are the reason why a world where everyone is kind to one another and helps each other is impossible.
Being kind like Martin Luther King Junior gets you killed. I don’t want to die.
So no, we do not believe your excuses and your claims. You *did* vote for Trump and you do support him.
People like Mary Catelli, ey81, 60guilders and you have made it so that nice guys do finish last, and I don’t want to finish last. Bieng kind has become a path to a painful death because of you people.
Dramatic much?
Abusive much? (Accusing others of being “emotional” or “overreacting” is right out of the abuser’s playbook. How appropriate that someone who idolizes a convicted rapist uses it.)
Also, in response to your delicately voiced suggestion that I need to learn more about American politics: make me.
“How appropriate that someone who idolizes a convicted rapist uses it.”
Assumes facts not in evidence. I think Trump is reckless and feckless and shouldn’t be president.
“Also, in response to your delicately voiced suggestion that I need to learn more about American politics: make me.”
So you’d rather not let your opinions be confused by facts? Got it.
“Assumes facts not in evidence.”
Liar.
“Liar”
Evidence?
“Evidence?”
Get stuffed.
Is Trump innocent of raping Stormy Daniels, then? Or paying hush money to her?
And are his connections to Epstien completely innocent?
Or is the evidence against him automatically illegitimate because it came from the Mainstream Media?
Hint: It isn’t automatically debunked by turning up on Mainstream News.
The hypothetical event that Trump will leave office in a conventional manner does not mean that the preceding concerns that he will not were baseless.
Nevertheless, when one is pushing a theory, especially regarding another person’s behavior, and that theory is proven incorrect, the honorable thing to do is admit it. Our host has given the most sober take I’ve seen on Trump’s fascist leanings, but he’s ignored evidence against the paradigm, as well as similar behavior from the opposition. We’ve seen from the death of Charlie Kirk how the constant cry of “fascist” can have tragic consequences, and I think one way to step back from that is to be ready to acknowledge when the other guy chooses NOT to do the fascist thing.
Please check Bret’s Bluesky; he has openly refused to side with Charlie Kirk’s killer and defied calls for violence from the ‘black bloc’ while outlining the logic of nonviolent tactics.
I just went through his Bluesky (I scrolled through 5 months of posts, and CTR+F’d “Kirk”); is this the post you’re referring to?
https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3lz3gnm5vgc2w
And this one?
https://bsky.app/profile/joestieb.bsky.social/post/3lypwzrpi3k2r
They’re not bad, but from what you said, I was hoping to find an instance where someone on Bluesky (or in an article he linked to) was actively cheering Kirk’s death and/or calling for more violence, and Bret shutting them them down like he shuts down purveyors of false history on Twitter. To be fair, I’m pleased that I saw no open calls for violence on his threads to begin with.
See, this sounds like an attempt to damn with faint praise.
Oh, you’re saying Bret didn’t shut down open calls for violence because there were none on his Bluesky.
That means there were *none on his bluesky*.
I agree entirely.
So…does funding buses driving people towards the Capitol, whom you encourage to “fight”, count as “the fascist thing” in this context?
https://www.dailydot.com/news/charlie-kirk-delete-tweet-buses-capitol/
For that matter, if the premise is that excessive accusations of fascism are the kind of speech which can lead to violence, then wouldn’t one be in a position to credibly link much of the deceased’s speech to violence?
This is the example where his words were followed by violence almost immediately, but a lot of this speech could also be credibly described as inciting violence (from the link in another comment I left on here.)
Of course, killing people is wrong – and I think it’s worth noting that if Kirk were living in any number of countries which give jail terms for these things (i.e. France, which once jailed a black pro-Le Pen comedian, Dieudonné, for two months over antisemitic speech), he would almost certainly still be alive today – either because of not saying these things in the first place, or because he would have been cooling heels in minimal security on the day he ended up targeted by his assassin. For extra irony, that includes Russia, whose anti-discrimination law, Article 282, prohibits “inciting hate or degrading personal dignity” on the grounds of “sex, race, gender, nationality, language, origin, religion or membership of a social class” (predictably, sexual orientation is explicitly left out). Yet Kirk had at one point apologized to Russia for American weapon deliveries to Ukraine, and was lionized in death for it by a number of officials there – when if he actually was a Russian citizen, he could have had easily ended up with a 5-year prison term under this law.
Yet Kirk had at one point apologized to Russia for American weapon deliveries to Ukraine, and was lionized in death for it by a number of officials there – when if he actually was a Russian citizen, he could have had easily ended up with a 5-year prison term under this law.
Doesn’t that really depend on how courts, and society, interpret the laws? (Courts do lead society, at least to some degree, but they generally don’t diverge too far from public opinion, since that would risk discrediting themselves). In the last analysis, laws only have the meaning and force that society chooses to give them.
I’ve known lots of people after all, from countries which formally ban, uh, ethnically inflammatory or religiously inflammatory speech, who cheerfully say things or hold positions that would be completely unacceptable in America, and very rare to hear anyone say. Sometimes these are private conversations (although even someone sharing opinions in private still tells you something about general sentiment), but sometimes these are even sitting politicians. I think what’s formally on the law books usually matters less than many people think.
In my opinion, merely calling for protest, or driving people to a protest, is not an incitement to violence, even if that protest turns violent. From what I understand, neither Trump nor Kirk encouraged protesters to actually storm the Capitol, break things and try to detain people there. If they DID, then I would count it as incitement. I DO agree that the protest itself should not have happened to begin with. If Charlie Kirk actually encouraged people to beat up blacks or Jews, again that would count as incitement to violence, but absent that, no.
With that in mind, and due to the survey I cited in my reply to Hector below, I believe I should not have said what I did about crying fascist leading to tragic consequences. Our host has not said anything inciting violence, and it was not fair of me to imply that he was. Other countries can have their anti-hate speech laws if they want, but I’m a big believer in the First Amendment. “I disagree with what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
Looks like my reply to Hector didn’t take, trying again, I came across a survey which made me rethink my concerns about words causing increased political violence:
https://x.com/JustinGrimmer/status/1966997411060215960
@Gamereg,
As far as I can tell, Charlie Kirk was assassinated because of his specific substantive views on transgenderism and homosexuality, not because he was or wasn’t a “fascist”. Wouldn’t you agree with that? His substantive views would still have been his views, whatever label you attached to them, and would still have inflamed Tyler Robinson to the point that he felt it was right to assassinate him. Likewise, Donald Tump’s apparent desire to annex Greenland is equally alarming (to me, anyway) whether you think it’s “inspired by Mussolini” or “inspired by Theodore Roosevelt”, his foreign aid cuts would be equally alarming whether you think they’re inspired by “limited government” or because he’s indifferent to Black people, etc..
The labels (true or false) matter a bit, but I don’t think they matter all that much, especially when someone is in the limelight as much as Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk and we can easily figure out exactly what they think substantively about everything, without even needing an ideological label.
FWIW, three casings found with the suspected weapon had Hey, fascist! Catch!” inscribed on them.
That being said, I’m now thinking I should have left out the part about influencing violence by yelling fascism. Today I just came across a survey cited that shows there’s been no change in support for political violence over the past two years:
https://x.com/JustinGrimmer/status/1966997411060215960
Original source:
https://americaspoliticalpulse.com/citizens/#citizen-landing-affpol
I put this up to show that I’m not trying to push a partisan agenda here, just trying to encourage civil discussion and follow-through.
@Gamereg ‘Hey fascist, catch’ is a meme from the gaming community he was a radical member of. The likelihood it had anything at all and to do with whether he thought Kirk was a fascist is low, considering how much that particular community uses anti-fascist rhetoric ironically.
What about you, Game reg?
Like I said in another thread here, I will come back here after Jan. 6th, 2028. If Trump has made at least an attempt to stay in office at that time, I’ll say I was wrong.
And I say that your dismissal of what Trump has already done is a bad thing.
What makes you think that he changes his mind after four years of continuous access to the levers of power and the perks of legal immunity?
Accomplishing most of his goals, his advisors convincing him the attmept will cost him more than he could hope to gain. Also see ey81’s comment lower down pointing out that he hasn’t annexed Canada, or cleared out Gaza, etc.
Right now I’m giving it a 60% chance he’ll actively try to exploit some perceived loophole to stay in office, but then give up after the court shuts him down, a 30% chance he’ll just step down with no fuss, and a 10% chance he’ll have to be physically removed from the White House after Jan. 6th.
@Gamereg
Even ignoring that appears much more reasonable than the behaviour that Trump has displayed up till now in his second term*, the Democrats will likely campaign on reversing most of Trump’s ‘accomplishments’, from cutting cancer research, through starting trade wars against random countries for dumb reasons, to giving super big tax cuts to the rich.
* Like picking Canada and Mexico as the first targets of his trade wars; despite that contemporary trade relations had been governed by the USMCA trade agreement Trump had signed himself in his first term, so one would expect that he of all countries would be the least displeased with trade relations of Canada and Mexico.
Not that I am saying that I am saying he will try to remain in office using some kind of trick. It is perfectly possibly that by 2028 he is already suffering from dementia and will be too senile to actively attempt stay in office counterlegally.
In the paragraph starting “And then you have the age-and-gender words”, shouldn’t the order of adulescens and iuvenis be reversed? Later on you write “typically adulescentes are in their teens or early twenties while iuvenes are young men from their twenties through their thirties”.
“through shear force of honos” -> sheer force
“I think ti is essential” -> it is
What we carved in Scotland, used to be the turnips with the yellow flesh and tough purplish skin, known locally as neeps, in other words, swedes, Swedish turnips. Rutabagas I think. The best Hallowe’en turnips have a good purple side. You hollow out the inside but never puncture right through, peeling off the purple outside skin to let the glow show through.
I can see why the Americans preferred pumpkins; they’re much softer. Carving a neep can generate blisters and bad language. I have carved many, both as a child and as a parent.
The smell of singeing turnip flesh is part of my childhood.
Here’s a verse my father wrote:
I’m Tumshie the neep from Kilbirnie
Although I’m gey quiet I’m no girnie
But last Hallowe’en nicht
Man, I gie’d them a fricht.
They thocht I would burst but I didnae.
Translation:
I’m Tumshie (another name for a neep) the swede from Kilbirnie (my home town)
Although I’m very quiet I’m not a complainer.
But last Hallowe’en night
I gave them a fright
They thought I would explode but I didn’t.
I will note that the Roman habit of calling a 35-year-old adult male a “young man” seems to be by no means unique to them. A lot of discourse in modern America surrounding the ‘millennial’ and ‘generation Z’ demographics still seems to treat the millennials as if they were children… when at this point the oldest millennials are in their mid-forties and the oldest gen-Zers are about thirty.
It’s psychologically easy to ignore “virtually no one under 25 can afford a house,” because that’s not an expectation. But to acknowledge that adults who would be in their prime years of autonomy and household-building (35-45 years old, by this point you’re supposed to have settled down, if only because it’s becoming biologically impossible to have kids if you wait much longer) cannot afford houses… Well, a lot of people in our society don’t want to do it. So they talk like everyone born after about 1980 is a child and will always be a child and that any problems they may have are purely a lack of personal virtue.
Two possible classes of answers.
1) Our peasant iuvenes didn’t buy their farms/houses, either; they inherited them. Conclusion: boo!, mers. Furthermore, boo population growth and immigration and
latifundiacorporatelandlords and so on.2) Contemporary culture has at least one mistaken assumption in the below list:
– That it habitually says “house” when it should be saying “flat/apartment”.
– That it assumes that once an area has been turned from farmland to built-up area, it must instantly become a museum of itself, and is not allowed to further increase in density, or change in land use.
– That its respectability standards are anywhere near reasonable, and that people should care about them even a little. E.g. “people shouldn’t have kids if they can’t give each their own room”.
For an example of changing standards, note that in Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear” the children (of opposite sexes, no less, though admittedly young) don’t even get their own beds, much less their own rooms.
I wonder whether there is a fourth item that could be added to that list:
‘– Supply and demand does not apply to housing; you see, that rent and housing is so expensive in the USA is not because of unreasonable regulations, from single-family zoning to minimum plot sizes, needlessly restricting supply but because the landlords and developers are greedy.’
I have encountered attitudes in that vein* a few times, and even more complaints about it on the internet; though as I myself am not from the USA I might be overestimating how common those actually are.
* Usually a bit less obviously dumb than the given example. For example, sometimes you instead encounter the claim that increases in rent and house prices are instead primarily driven by income growth as those two are correlated; however, this ignores that severe increases in rent and house prices increase average income by driving out low-income people.
That is one I agree with. In the first few years of my life my parents did not have their own house and lived in an apartment in my grandparents attic; once my parents had their own house I slept on a mattress lying on the floor of the attic together with my two siblings thanks to lengthy rebuildings of other rooms in the house.
As far as I recall that had no negative effects on me.
However, in the USA expected standards of living are so decadent that there are more new single-family homes being build with four or more full bathrooms than one full bathroom or less*, yet when inflation is a few percent higher than normal people still become crazy and go on how that ‘the US middle-class had it better in the seventies because according to the TV people then lived in larger houses’. Because whilst unemployment, inflation, and interest rates in the seventies all peaked in the double digits thanks to the stagflation crisis, certainly the same TV which shows documentaries according to which aliens had build the pyramids would not lie about how large houses were back then.
* I had once encountered the claim that in the USA houses had an absurd number of full bathrooms and looked it up out of curiosity: https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/08/rising-trends-in-number-of-bathrooms-in-single-family-homes-in-2023 Living in Europe, my reaction was ‘why would a single-family home even need more than one full bathroom?’…
“However, in the USA expected standards of living are so decadent that there are more new single-family homes being build with four or more full bathrooms than one full bathroom or less*” “* I had once encountered the claim that in the USA houses had an absurd number of full bathrooms and looked it up out of curiosity: https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/08/rising-trends-in-number-of-bathrooms-in-single-family-homes-in-2023 Living in Europe, my reaction was ‘why would a single-family home even need more than one full bathroom?’…”
What are the US even counting as “full bathrooms”?
“What are the US even counting as “full bathrooms”?”
Sink, toilet, bathtub, shower. The last two can be combined.
A half-bath skips the bathtub/shower.
As for why you’d want them: Most homes have a master suite (a term that’s falling out of favor, but still widely used) that necessarily includes a full bathroom. This is no longer completely cut off from the rest of the family, but is more private. The second would be for general use. And a third is useful if you have a lot of people in the house–parties, for example.
I’ve found that whenever you find yourself wondering “Why do Americans do this absurd thing?” the answer is “We were copying the rich, and it got out of hand.” Our obsession with grass lawns is due to wealthy Europeans having grass lawns. Sweet tea came from conspicuous consumption, as both ingredients were expensive. Large homes were built on the assumption that we’d routinely host dinner parties.
I will say, growing up in a big family, having multiple bathrooms was nice. Less wait time. My boys handle this by, well, being boys. Trees work just as well, and the pandemic made hand sanitizer ubiquitous.
Hmm, as I yesterday had some time too many I ended up looking up the definitions used by the Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction which that article had used as source. It looks like I had suffered from a mistaken assumption somewhere.
I had initially assumed that they had used as definition ‘A bathroom with a toilet, sink, and bathtub (possibly including a shower).’, as that was the definition I had encountered previously for ‘full bathroom’. By contrast, a bathroom with a toilet, sink, and shower stall but without a bathtub was a ‘three-quarter bathroom’ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/three-quarter_bathroom). Though it does make me wonder what term would be used for a bathroom with only a bath/shower, but no toilet.
However, when I had looked it up it turned that bathrooms without a bath but with a shower were according to that census also counted as ‘full bathrooms’.
( https://www.census.gov/construction/soc/definitions.html ):
I suppose using such definitions a single-family home with three bathrooms is less frivolous than I had first assumed.
(The definition had also mentioned something about ‘If the respondent reported a full bathroom and two half bathrooms, the house is classified as a two-bathroom house.’. However, I don’t think that applied on the data on the blog post I had linked previously as it specifically mentioned the amount of ‘full bathrooms’; and I on the ‘Survey of Construction’ also found a different table with differing numbers that also mentioned single-family homes with ‘1 1/2 baths or less’ or ‘2 1/2 baths’.)
@Dinwar:
Ah, that is something I had not thought of.
In the discussion on the internet on that tendency in the US it had instead been claimed to be caused by parents thinking that ‘teenagers are gross’ and not wanting to share bathrooms with them.
I thought putting enormous sugar in tea was something they also did in the Middle East, so it isn’t something uniquely American.
Though, I am not sure that all ‘weird’ things about the USA are explained by ‘copying the rich, and it got out of hand.’
For example, I had been told that one of the reasons there are so few public swimming pools in the USA was racism. When the courts forced local governments to desegregate public swimming pools many decided they’d rather close them than allowing blacks equal access in them.
“In the discussion on the internet on that tendency in the US it had instead been claimed to be caused by parents thinking that ‘teenagers are gross’ and not wanting to share bathrooms with them.”
There’s that too. If you’re affluent enough to not have to share a bathing space and toilet with someone who’s biochemistry is being altered in amusing ways and who’s still got a dubious grasp on hygiene, you don’t share the room!
I know one married couple who had two master suites, because the husband and wife didn’t want to share sleeping and bathing spaces together. Worked out well for them, and given the number of kids they had it didn’t seem to hurt the romance.
There are also places with separate bathrooms for different people due to tasks. My grandfather was a machinist, welder, etc (sort of jack of all trades when it came to metal), and his family installed a bathroom specifically for him to wash up in after work. I’ve done the same thing myself, at truck stops. Sometimes you just really don’t want to bring that crud into the house! Grandpa also did his own laundry, because he wasn’t going to have his wife deal with the stuff on his cloths. Not unusual for his area, either. It’s one reason I tend to laugh at the idea of a hard line between “men’s work” and “women’s work”. If you’re below a certain economic threshold, there’s just work–either you do it, or you go without, and welding naked is generally not considered a wise career move!
“I thought putting enormous sugar in tea was something they also did in the Middle East, so it isn’t something uniquely American.”
Didn’t know that. I knew they did that with coffee–Turkish coffee is often very heavy on sugar, with 1-1 ratios of coffee to sugar not being uncommon. The origin of it in the South is different, though. Maybe originally it came from the Middle East, but it was filtered through European aristocracy and Southern gentility, and was for a long time a form of conspicuous consumption.
“Though, I am not sure that all ‘weird’ things about the USA are explained by ‘copying the rich, and it got out of hand.’”
Oh, of course not. We have plenty of weird things because of other aspects of our history. We’re a culture like any other, with our own quirks and idiosyncrasies and foibles. It’s just that a fair number of these stem from attempts to copy wealthy people.
The sugar thing is not unique to the USA (although a taste for the very sweet seems to have more hold there). Sugar was cheap calories – the English poor subsisted on sweet tea, bread and lard for a couple of centuries (and the Indian poor still do (substituting for the lard).
The term “house” has changed.
In Rome the average person (read: peasant) lived in a house that was built out of local materials–typically sticks and mud. The place had very few rooms, and primarily was used to keep the rain off you while you slept. You didn’t live in your home; you lived outside, in the fields and forests and whatnot. And socializing didn’t happen in the home, it happened in the tavern (I’ve heard British pubs described as “the community’s living room”). A lot of this, to be fair, had to do with survival–you lived outside because you were constantly working, and you had a small house because heating was limited and honestly you didn’t need much more. (If you did you could build more relatively easily.)
Compare that to a modern house. I’ve got a modest one, and it’s still about ten rooms (depends on how you count bathrooms), any one of which could have served as a house for a Roman or Medieval peasant. And the amenities! Hearths became stoves, but running water? Electricity? Heating and air conditioning? Glass windows? Artificial refrigeration? Things that a peasant couldn’t have dreamed of in the past. I even have a yard, a concept that started out as conspicuous consumption among the super-wealthy!
Where I’m going with this is, the modern concept of a house is so different from ancient ones that I’m not sure any meaningful comparison can be made between them. At best, an ancient house could be considered a combination of communal bedroom and kitchen.
I think this is one of many areas where we sympathize with the rich and powerful too much. When we think of ancient houses we think of the senator’s estates, or the local baron’s castle. We don’t consider the fact that 90% of the population built their homes the same way they built their pig styes, or that fundamentally the two (house and stye) served pretty much the same purpose.
“The term “house” has changed.
In Rome the average person (read: peasant)”
Pretty obviously no. There may have been appreciable part, perhaps even a majority, of people in Rome who were peasant, as in, walked daily from the Seven Hills to cultivate their fields in Ager Romanum, in Rome of the Kings.
In Roman Republic, there would still have been fields in Ager Romanum… but the peasants who daily walked to Servian Walls would have made a decisive minority of those who lived inside the pomerium!
“A lot of this, to be fair, had to do with survival–you lived outside because you were constantly working,”
There was a lot of work you had to do where your tools and supplies were. Weaving, cooking… for men, making and repairing the tools to use in the fields and forests.
“Compare that to a modern house. I’ve got a modest one, and it’s still about ten rooms (depends on how you count bathrooms), any one of which could have served as a house for a Roman or Medieval peasant. And the amenities! Hearths became stoves, but running water? Electricity? Heating and air conditioning? Glass windows? Artificial refrigeration? Things that a peasant couldn’t have dreamed of in the past. I even have a yard, a concept that started out as conspicuous consumption among the super-wealthy!”
The only things that the Romans did not have were electricity, artificial refrigeration and air conditioning.
Yard? Fences and gates that could hold raging bulls are routine items for peasants, so little special in having a yard.
Glass windows and running water? Yes. They were rare, and clear window glass specifically was a new invention in time of Plinius. But it was something, not that peasants could have while still peasants, but what peasants could dream of, see and meet people who had achieved these.
Like, did N. Popidius Ampliatus and M. Cerrinius Vatia have glass windows at home? Branches of Aqua Augusta?
Both were in experience of Roman peasants – in different way. A free citizen of Pompeii – including a freed slave! – might hearken to the request of fugitive slaves to elect M. Cerrinius Vatia as aedile (fugitive slaves could not vote, lawfully manumitted ones could) and be a client in the house of his patron M. Cerrinius Vatia, admiring glass windows in the atrium. Or he might be an invited guest at a feast of N. Popidius Ampliatus, who could afford to build Temple of Isis in the name of his 6 year old son (like Trimalchio hosted feasts in a town whose name seems not to be preserved).
But where did an “average” person in Pompeii live? What was an average “house” in Pompeii like?
This
https://www.mikoflohr.org/pompeii/
counts 499 “houses”, 467 “taberna units”, 133 “apartments”, 54 “units”…
Are all of them the same terms Roman used? Would a Roman contemporary tax collector, like the aedile M. Cerrinius Vatia (if he did get elected) have come up with the same grouping, same lists and same totals? What did contemporaries actually define as “domus”, “insula”, “villa”?
“…but the peasants who daily walked to Servian Walls would have made a decisive minority of those who lived inside the pomerium!”
The term is being used loosely. The metabolic demands of wheat production preclude any fewer than around 80% of people in any pre-industrial society from being anything other than dirt-poor farmers living just above subsistence. There was recently a very long series of essays on this blog demonstrating that. Call them what you will, and have them inhabit where you will, dirt-poor farmer is the equivalent of peasant. And remember, we’re discussing why houses are harder to obtain today. The fact that 80% of our population isn’t dirt-poor peasants AND DO NOT EXPECT TO LIVE LIKE ONE is a rather significant issue.
I actually got a good case-study in just how significantly things have changed in a few generations. My family owns my great-grandfather’s home, and I’ve spent some time there. Plumbing and electricity were added onto the thing–as in, they expanded the house specifically to add pipes and things. The old outhouse was still there when I was a kid (rotted away, but the stone ring is there). Lighting was repurposed gas. They didn’t use the fireplace, but it was there. There were FAR fewer rooms than my current home, all of which were smaller. And so on. And his home was pretty normal for a farmer of his day. Mine is pretty normal for an office worker of my day–meaning we’re both the norm for our civilizations.
“There was a lot of work you had to do where your tools and supplies were.”
Partially correct. You also have to consider biproducts and methods. Washing cloths had to be done outside because confined spaces like rooms prevented adequate air flow. Gardens had to be outside because sunlight.
And then there’s cooking. Fire is nice when it’s an occasional leisure thing, but smoke-filled rooms (necessary for cooking) become less enjoyable the more you’re in them. And women’s work could often be done outside–outdoor looms were a thing (remember, most looms in history were much simpler than the ones we tend to think of).
This of course is in sharp contrast to today, where we design rooms around intended uses, with extremely complicated infrastructure to accommodate those uses.
“The only things that the Romans did not have were electricity, artificial refrigeration and air conditioning.”
The only things RICH Romans didn’t have. Even if we stupidly limit ourselves to non-peasants (remember, that’s the top 10-20% of society, for biological reasons), most of them didn’t have access to glass. Running water was communal, not “a sink in a room near my bed”. Yards are similar. What you describe isn’t a yard in the modern sense, it’s a paddock for livestock. Yards in the modern sense were invented in the Early Modern era as a place for the ultra-wealthy to play games; even in early America not everyone had yards in the sense of broad expanses of grass that they maintained for aesthetics. And so on.
This is one of those situations where you can, if so inclined, twist and distort the definitions until you get whatever answer you want. But the simple fact is the average person in the USA lives in a home that is FUNDAMENTALLY different–in construction, in content, in function–than the average Roman. To pretend otherwise is to intentionally misunderstand history. Such misunderstandings are incredibly common (“Kingdom of Heaven”, “A Knight’s Tale”, even “Mort d’Arther” fall victim to this), but are never the less dangerous. Remember, our question is why people today in the prime of their working years struggle to buy houses. By distorting the terms you obfuscate the fairly self-evident reasons why houses today are far more difficult to obtain than houses in the past.
“But where did an “average” person in Pompeii live?”
The fact that you’re limiting yourself to cities is a problem. The average person in that civilization had as much access to glass as the average person today does to fully-reconstructed T. rex skeletons.
“It’s psychologically easy to ignore “virtually no one under 25 can afford a house,” because that’s not an expectation. But to acknowledge that adults who would be in their prime years of autonomy and household-building (35-45 years old, by this point you’re supposed to have settled down, if only because it’s becoming biologically impossible to have kids if you wait much longer) cannot afford houses… ”
But this isn’t true, at least not in the US. More than 60% of all US adults aged 35-44 own their own home. (True, it may be a flat rather than a house, but you can have kids in a flat!) https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
Hi Brett
Can I echo a point you mentioned in today’s post? I love reading what you have to say about history and particularly how you relate it to modern fiction, but contemporary politics are a major turn-off for me.
The problem is that it’s so damn *seductive*. Whichever side you take, if you read a strong political view on the Internet then it leads you to engage, either by agreeing with the post about how awful the bad people are for doing such bad things, or by disagreeing with the post because it’s an written by a bad person suggesting something awful.
Then you read further opinions, maybe in the comments section, maybe following a link or maybe just looking stuff up because you’re so angry about whatever bad thing the commentator described / bad view the commentator expressed. Further reading leads to anger, anger leads to hate and I’m pretty sure the Dark Side of the Force is at the end of that chain somewhere.
I’ve been there and didn’t like the person it made me become, so I’m trying quite hard to avoid it. I know you have strong political views, and that’s entirely fair, but would you consider expressing them in a different forum? Your blog is one of the very small number of places on the Internet which has an interesting focus and largely rage-free comment section, and there’s a huge value to that.
Dr. Deveraux is a professional academic, which means that he is employed by academia, so the fate of academica (which is always strongly influenced, and ultimately decided, by its country’s politics and political climate) would be of significant interest to him to a much stronger degree than it would be for someone who has no relationship to institutions of higher education and no significant investment in their continued existence and prosperity qua academia.
I am personally not an academic, but I, too, work in an educational field where I simply cannot afford NOT to pay attention to politics (much as I’d like to do otherwise) precisely BECAUSE politics has an enormous influence on my job prospects and my ability to do my job in the first place. So I can sympathize with Dr. Deveraux’s position here.
That’s not to speak of those for whom politics directly affects their quality of life (or indeed, their ability to *live a life unbothered* in the first place) to a degree that you may not be able to understand.
So, in short: Some of us cannot afford NOT to pay attention to politics.
Maybe I’m being unfair referencing this to your remarks about defunding history departments, which seems like a fairly innocuous point, but a few months ago one of your more political posts absolutely did lead me into a spiral of angry doomscrolling. On one level I should be able to read that kind of thing and ignore it, but that is quite hard. Sorry.
I didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was before he was shot, but now that I have seen some of his videos, what really impressed me was how he managed to remain calm in the fact of vituperative assaults on both his ideas and himself. I wish I was like that.
It’s easy to remain calm when you hold your political opponents in deepest contempt. That said, Kirk had more than a few of his moments where the right provocation could get him rather explosive (even if such moments were often edited out of his own content). Something that springs to my mind was the way he reacted when somebody was incredulous about him comparing abortion access to the Holocaust (and the intense vitriol with which he asserted that it was worse).
Hear, hear!
Being calm while spouting vacuous talking points is better than being angry while spouting vacuous talking points, I guess, but neither of them is really good or useful to society.
As I said below:
And for the record, I came here for the Siege of Gondor series, then the Historical Posts, then I discovered the politics; Bret may not be full pundit, but he is better than Charlie Kirk and Ibram X. Kendi (aka one of the ‘woke’ that the right-wingers here like to bash) *combined*.
The only thing I disagree with him about is the effectiveness of nonviolence, but even I acknowledge that my disagreement is not rooted in concrete data while his’ arguments are.
Those who have Bret’s best intersts at heart should urge him to run for office and fund the campaign.
Does “calm” here refer to emotional affectation of speech and body language alone? I suspect quite many people would not describe the delivery of “ideas” like this as “calm” even if it were done in a monotone.
https://archive.md/vKDz6
Agreed. In the vein of this article, dissecting the societal understandings of words and how that shapes culture (and vice versa), there’s something deeply strange that our interpretation of the word ‘calm’ in this instance means ‘holding your voice steady and level’ and appears to be completely detached from whether what you are asking for in your calm and level voice is in any way ‘calm’ whatsoever.
> So the near-universal practice was instead to refer to patronage (patrocinium, clientela) relationships in terms of amicitia, ‘friendship.’
That explains why some people are to this day confusing friendship with patronage. 😀
I find it interesting that, with “virtue” deriving from “masculinity,” displays of performative masculinity (which are often thought of positively within contemporary Western – especially American – culture) are, quite literally, “virtue signalling” (a term that many of the people who look kindly upon displays of masculinity would find insulting to have applied to their actions).
And yet virtus is something that can’t really be, in the Roman mind, signaled, but only demonstrated. You cannot posture virtus, you can only *do it* in a context where it involves real risk or demands real labor.
Hm, I think it would be fascinating to compare some common load bearing terms in Roman times, with similar terms in modern times. Are the same traits/issues still relevant? How has our understanding of the ideal traits of a person changed in 2000 years? Maybe this has changed less than we think? Or, to put it more precisely, maybe more nuanced than we think?
I remember someone doing studies of defamation cases in swedish law starting in about the 1600’s and into the present.
Turns out most terms used in the 1600’s is no longer seen as defamatory enough to go to court… The one exception being the word “whore”.
@Arilou,
That is fascinating, and now I’m imagining how a libel trial along those lines would go.
America has unusually expansive freedom of speech, but certainly here, i don’t think calling someone a wh*re would ever be considered criminally actionable, mostly because the term has become so essentially vague and subjective (although it certainly is defamatory). It means essentially “someone more promiscuous than I think they should be”, and although I guess you *could* try to prove you weren’t one, it would be difficult.
The subject of load-bearing terms is an interesting one. I’ve made a constructed language, and found that it’s really, really hard–I’d say outside of some of the more bizarre experimental linguistics, functionally impossible–to make a language that’s not intimately tied to the culture.
To give an example, English has Mrs. Miss, and the like. Read any historic literature and you’re immediately struck with just how fundamental this are to the way people spoke. It’s not accidental; at the time, marital status was part of one’s identity, and fundamental to one’s place in society (English is a remarkably caste-based language). It need not be that way–and in fact, men aren’t treated the same, as we have “Master” for boys, “Mister” for men, and “Doctor” for those who obtained the rank, none of which presume or even indicate marital status. And this is interesting because you can watch it change over time. The song “Me and Mrs. Jones” is already tinged with the archaic, as we simply don’t use these terms in everyday language anymore.
I’ve long argued that love is another one. English has a remarkably limited vocabulary for discussing love–the term is almost exclusively limited to romantic love or the immediate products thereof (ie, the affection of parents for children and of siblings for one another). We really struggle to discuss platonic love (the fact that I have to use “platonic” here, because the default is romantic, illustrates my point). I think it’s one of the things driving current loneliness issues. Our language doesn’t even allow us to discuss other types of love effectively, and when your language doesn’t include a concept it’s really hard to consider that concept. We’re left with a world that presents romantic love as the only meaningful sort of companionship, and presents anyone who’s not totally fulfilled by romantic love as somehow defective. This quirk of modern language both reflects and creates this very isolating view of human interaction. (It’s coming to Halmark Season, and I loath those movies profoundly.)
It’s one (of many) reasons I’m a pretty strict Descriptivist in linguistics. The USA in particular is going through a period of rather intense cultural change, and that will necessarily have a profound impact on our language.
“The song “Me and Mrs. Jones” is already tinged with the archaic, as we simply don’t use these terms in everyday language anymore.”
This is true only for a very specific group of “we”. IME “Mrs” is still in extremely widespread use. “Miss” is less used, and “Master” has completely vanished.
“This is true only for a very specific group of “we”.”
I disagree–though I think this may be an area where personal experience is going to so heavily color our interpretation that my disagreement in no way implies that you’re wrong.
I do a lot of business correspondence, and work with a wide range of people, from government and elected officials (two separate categories) to day laborers and everyone in between. The only time in the past few years that I’ve seen “Mrs” used was in an obviously angry letter where the person was being sarcastic and couldn’t even get my wife’s name right (like many academics, she didn’t take my name when we married). For that matter, the use of last names in general has fallen out of favor, making the use of titles and honorifics even more problematic (using them with the first name doesn’t work in English).
That said, my wife is a teacher in the South. Her students call her Mrs routinely–not consistently, but commonly enough. So again, I can see where different lived experiences will result in different datasets and thus different conclusions.
All that said, the decrease in formality is so well-established that it’s hardly surprising that honorifics, titles, and the like follow suit. Just look at how people dress, or how the speak to one another. Try finding a home built in the last ten years with a formal dining room–or worse, a formal sitting room! They exist, but they’re really hard to come by. My family recently had cause to read some letters from my ancestors, and it was noted that my great-great grandmother required each grandchild to be formally presented to her when they visited. My parents would take it as an insult if my kids didn’t run up to them screaming in glee. So on the whole, while my interpretation may be a bit premature, I think it’s on the right path, and in a decade or two we’ll see “Mrs” relegated to very niche applications.
I can second that the decline in both honorifics and last names is real. There have been multiple instances where I have addressed someone I have never met in person in an email as “Dr. [Lastname]”, only to have them sign off their reply with “Cheers, [Firstname]”.
For that matter, the use of last names in general has fallen out of favor, making the use of titles and honorifics even more problematic (using them with the first name doesn’t work in English).
I think “Mrs” is a little different than honorifics like “Officer X”, “Doctor X”, “Professor X”, etc., in the sense that there are ideological reasons one might object to one but not the other.
I’m fine with doing away with “Mrs.” for example- I think feminists were right that it does center a woman’s maritial status in a way that I’d be happy to do away with. But, I’m not at all comfortable with moving away from titles and honorifics, and I would be sad to see them slide by the wayside.
Mrs also has a history even more linked to married identity. When my grandmother wrote a letter to the editor supporting the rights of college students like her daughters to protest against nuclear power plants in the 1970s she signed the letter “Mrs Charles E Lambdin”. No one would know her name was Dorothy.
“I do a lot of business correspondence, and work with a wide range of people, from government and elected officials (two separate categories) to day laborers and everyone in between. The only time in the past few years that I’ve seen “Mrs” used was in an obviously angry letter where the person was being sarcastic and couldn’t even get my wife’s name right”
This is very much not my experience! But I’m not saying you’re wrong – just that we’re operating in different cultural settings.
I think what is happening, as Ben says, is that the use of titles generally is vanishing. While I’d still start a letter “Dear Mr Smith” I wouldn’t write “Mr. John Smith, 25 Acacia Avenue, Sandford” on the envelope. It’d just be “John Smith”.
Swedish used to have an entire thing about referring to people in different ways not just depending on marital status but also class. There’s a famous swedish 19th century book (Carl Jonas Love Almquist’s “Det går an”) that basically starts with a guy pondering “Okay, exactly how shall I address this woman on this boat I want to talk to?”
Before we started dropping titles there was also the difference between “Proffesorskan” (the professor’s wife) and “professorinnan” (the female professor) and similar thing with a bunch of other titles.
Parallel recommendation to The Wooden World would be Brian Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy, aimed slightly later, which I very much liked. I was less impressed by his recent Two Navies Divided about the USN and RN in WWII, although in fairness that’s a period I’ve studied a lot more, so there was less new and interesting and I’m much better at spotting the occasional minor error. (Nothing huge, but the bits I’ve gotten through put it on the high side for my error budget.)
I just finished reading your series on the Gladiator battle scene and noticed that you made two references to HBO’s Rome. And there are a few other references scattered throughout your work (in your oaths article, I believe is one).
I’ve noticed that most historians who interact with popular culture the way you do seem to avoid doing any deep dives into the series: is there a particular reason for that?
I know there are some large inaccuracies from the little things to the sequencing of events; but I always felt it was one of those shows like Deadwood that were able to well establish the values and morals of their world through writing, making them both familiar and alien (which is funny because David Milch intended to originally write an HBO show set in Rome but found out they were already making one so he made Deadwood instead).
In essence, is there any chance to explore the show more?
Either way, point is that the conservatives here, even after Mary Cattelli quit commenting, are still acting in a way that shows they are more interested in being toxic to Bret and others than they are in good faith discussion.
“Hate brings forth Hate,” to paraphrase the Silmarillion, and I am not sure I am obliged to do anything but give the minimum of courtesy not to get banned from the blog here.
And by “being toxic” you mean we’re saying “no, your narrative is wrong, and here’s why” instead of saying “That’s right, Socrates.”
Much of that involved trying to delegitimize the scientific and academic establishments and their data, as I observed.
And whilw we’re at it, Bret isn’t a pundit, but his political views are better than Trump and Sanders’ combined, too. If you really had his best interests at heart, you’d urge him to run for midterms next year and fund the campaign.
And yes, this sounds crazy, but not as much as Mary Cattelli’s ranting.
I’m 99% certain Mary simply got banned on this blog. Her inability to ever not get the last word in, and the incredibly repetitive and vituperative threads it created, make me extremely doubtful she just quit cold turkey one day.
For that matter, I look at what our host wrote at the start of the year
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/10/fireside-friday-january-10-2025/
And it certainly does seem like you have been treating at least this specific comment section as a “battlefield”.
Considering the fact that she still writes on her Dreamwidth, true.
And to be fair, I am genuinely interested in the blog and Bret’s posts, it’s just that when I’m feeling good, I don’t feel the need to say anything.
I read Mary Cattelli’sposts on (On Grant Funding) and responded to them.
Also, “No Kings!”.
Forgot a space.
I would prefer comments from Mary Catelli (and ey81, 60guilders, and most other people you would label “conservatives”) to you, Highestsun.
Did Mary get into some heated political arguments with myself and others? Oh yes.
However, this is primarily a history blog, not a 21st C US politics blog, and on historical subjects Mary (and other “conservatives”) contributed thoughts, references, questions which made the comments section as a whole more interesting.
I only remember you, Highestsun, commenting when the subject is 21st C US politics. And all the comments from you are just whining about how awful other people are, and that they should be banned.
Why do you even bother? If you were a regular commentator on the historical posts, I would understand why you care about the tone and content in the political posts. But if you want to make a political difference today, surely there are forums / blogs / boards where you could have more impact.
I bother because I agree with Bret’s views more than I do with the established political alignments worldwide (including the real socialist left). He has provided data and said it in the least condescending way possible and yet people disagree with his ‘narrative’ while hinting that they’d prefer a way of life where I have no place. Why should I not extend only the minimum of kindness?
And for the record, I came here for the Siege of Gondor series, then the Historical Posts, then I discovered the politics; Bret may not be full pundit, but he is better than Charlie Kirk and Ibram X. Kendi (aka one of the ‘woke’ that the right-wingers here like to bash) *combined*.
The only thing I disagree with him about is the effectiveness of nonviolence, but even I acknowledge that my disagreement is not rooted in concrete data while his’ arguments are.
Would you recommend any other broad institutional histories of the type you recommended here? Or keywords to look for when searching for them? I generally prefer the kind of work in those to campaign histories but have a hard time finding them.
I REALLY wish my language classes had talked about cultural value words and hard-to-translate concepts instead of endlessly rattling off simple words and grammar. It would have made those classes MUCH more interesting, and I might have stuck with language study for longer if they had.
As it was, I felt like I was being transported back to kindergarten in those classes, learning one boring thing after another, by rote. Language teachers would do well to think about how to make their classes more interesting to hold on to more students, especially with language programs facing funding cuts.
100%. Though I think it’s a tricky one to do. You need a certain proficiency in a language to be able to dedicate the brainspace to looking at the connotations as well. Perhaps it can be done right from the get-go. Rather than teach people how to speak a language, teach them how to understand a culture. ‘When the French say ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’…what we hear is ‘Liberty, Egality, Fraternity’…but what they *actually mean by that* is [spins off into a lesson that blends history, language and cultural studies into one].
I suppose that does exist in your ‘classical education’, with the argument being that you need to be that far along your path of education to really engage with it.
Personally I think that’s selling young people mightily short. We’re connection-building-machines, and we’re never better at it than we are when we’re young.
Completely agree with you here- learning the basic vocabularly and rudimentary grammar (to the point of being able to have basic conversation) is boring, but until you have a solid foundation in those things, you won’t be able to get the higher-level nuances that make learning a language really fascinating.
I disagree, it is perfectly possible to explain those connotations and nuances in English. Why did I have to read this blog to learn the deep meaning of virtus, instead of getting that covered in the actual Latin class I sat in for three semesters!?
Making the early coursework super dull and only getting to the good stuff later simply doesn’t work for most students. Most students will suffer through the boring early stuff and then drop language study as soon as they’re allowed to, because they don’t know that it will *ever* get good. Whereas if you add in some good stuff *right from the beginning* alongside the boring basics, they might actually see why they should stay.
My take on the Hegseth/Trump meeting at Quantico is that it was a net good: They’ve sealed off any possibility of getting the military to support a coup attempt. The details are long, but basically (1) annoying the brass and offering them stick with no carrot for even the current initiatives, and (2) demonstrating that they’re terrible leaders (and even if you’re a toady, you don’t follow incompetent leaders into highly illegal plots, because they will likely lose).
That doesn’t mean the trouble is over, though, because even after January 20, 2029, our underlying social problems (the stresses between the working class and the college-educated class) will remain unaddressed.
> “This was not the product of impersonal economic forces but rather remains the product of intentional political choices and we could chose differently (and indeed, did so in the past).”
True, but you don’t get the people who have chosen to choose differently by simply pointing out that they *could*. You have to ask why they have chosen as they did and work from there.
My theory is that we’re seeing a class conflict between the blue-collar/working-class/proletariat and the white-collar/college-educated-class/bourgeoisie. Currently the proletariat has control of the government via the MAGA movement. From that point of view the gusher of money the federal government has sent into colleges over the past 80 years (since Vannevar Bush created the government research grant for universities) is a jobs program for the bourgeoisie. And since they’re not going to get any of the money, the proletariat doesn’t like the thought that they’re paying for it. (Actually it’s fiercer than that; every class wants to pull down the class above it even if they have to pay to do so, what matters is the *difference* between classes not one’s class’s median income.)
My personal hope is that the Democratic Party will focus on regaining political power, win elections, and start undoing the damage. But there seems to be a large faction of the inner, policy-making party people who overtly prioritize fighting for unpopular cultural changes over winning elections. So I’m not betting money on the Democrats succeeding.
That’s not quite the analysis I’ve taken from it, though considering that either could well be valid I’m not necessarily stating mine is outright correct.
The way I see it is as a class conflict between the working classes (those who work for their living) and the non-working classes (i.e. capitalists, people who own things for their living, and increasingly rentier-capitalists).
The latter have done an exceptionally effective job of conditioning the American working public (college educated or not) to believe that the true opponent in their class struggle is someone else (college-educated people, poor people, immigrants, trans people, red states, blue states, dems, republicans, boomers, millennials, gen Z…literally anyone else except themselves). Meanwhile, they have been making hay themselves through suppressing workers rights, giving themselves massive tax breaks, increased hoarding of assets, and now open and flagrant government corruption.
That’s not to say that the grievances they have been using to achieve this aren’t legitimate (at least some of them really, really are). But they’re used as distraction tactics to keep working people fighting among themselves about who’s got what dangly bits in 0.5% of the population, rather than getting together to complain that all their rents have tripled over the past 15 years.
Both major political parties have been deeply penetrated by these interests and are having extreme difficulty shaking them off (or, really, extreme difficulty in deciding whether they even want to shake them off). The Republicans appear to have substantially given up, with the Democrats being in the middle of this tussle at present (it’s not clear which direction it’s going to go).
This has been played out in a microcosm in the NY mayoral elections. Mamdani (wildly popular, centring economically-focussed progressive policies while batting away culture war nonsense without chucking people under the bus) vs Cuomo (establishment democrat, sex offender, coached by Trump on how to win the election, lost in his primary but tried to challenge Mamdani anyway) and Adams (I know less about him, but enough to know that he’s about as establishment-democrat-in-a-bad-way as they come). Mamdani’s just won it (despite many establishment democrats refusing to back him, and masses of finances being poured into his opposition). It will be interesting to see how the democrat party reacts to this, considering that it’s been a major success but goes against the rentier-capitalist influence.
I suspect it makes more sense to blame NIMBY’s blocking the construction of significant amounts of cheap housing for that rather than ‘capitalists’.
My limited knowledge makes me even wonder whether that the ‘capitalists’ might also not be the victims of such policies, I had read that some tech companies were even leaving California for Texas because their employees could not find housing at reasonable prices in the former.
I suppose that depends on how successful his policies are perceived to have been when the next elections near.
Based on what I have read* his platform is from an economic perspective even dumber than usual for politicians.
* Like this here: https://jackonomics.substack.com/p/mamdani-2025-youd-better-hope-theyre
I had also read a newspaper interview with somebody who had migrated from my country to NYC and is pro-Mamdani; why that they thought readers here should know about municipal elections on the other side of the Atlantic is a mystery to me.
Having gone over what I know a second time; I now wonder whether his platform might be even worse than it appears at a first glance; due to the combined effects of his policies.
He wants to both lower grocery prices by creating city-owned grocery stores subsidised by not having to pay rent or property taxes, and greatly increase the minimum wage.
Taking into account that grocery stores are known for their low margins I don’t want to be a NYC grocery store-owner in the next few years. They will face state-owned competition subsidised to the point they can, if run as effectively as private ones, sell their goods at prices private stores could impossibly be profitable at; and suffer increased labour costs because of the raise in minimum wages.
—
Though, I don’t know much about NYC politics. Maybe it is possible the bad/worst parts of his platform get watered down enough that they won’t do much damage without his voters being disappointed because the rest is still fulfilled? That might make for a best case scenario…
Not to mention that the perception will be more important than the actual results in influencing politics.
Last year media negativity bias and social media doomerism* had caused US voters to hallucinate a ‘recession’ into being despite most economic indicators being good. Maybe we can this time have a reverse situation where people in other parts in the USA are too busy talking about NYC’s free childcare and baby baskets to notice all those bankrupt grocery stores?
* Or at least I think that were main the reasons.
I also encountered the claim that the negative perception of the economy was cause by people comparing their situation with 2021 when their disposable income was higher without taking into account it only was so because of temporary fiscal stimulus measures to reduce the damage the pandemic inflicted on the economy. ( https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2024/07/why-do-people-feel-bad-about-economy.html )
However, the existence of polls in which both a majority of respondents claim that they themselves had it good and a majority of respondents claim that their country had it bad still makes me think media negativity bias and social media doomerism had been more important.
Hmm, looking back at what I had written yesterday I wonder whether I had not been accidentally unclear.
It had been mostly Mamdani’s ‘lower grocery prices by heavily subsidised municipally owned grocery stores’ idea I thought ‘even dumber than usual’, as most of the other ideas either seem not dumb based on my limited understanding of the situation or do seem dumb but have already been done by many other politicians.
That blog post you read is from months ago, and in particular, it does not note that Mamdani’s plan only calls for five (5) municipally-owned grocery stores across a city of more than 8 million. Even Politico, an outlet owned by a Trump-friendly, climate-dismissing and unrepentantly Zionist oligarch (much like the rest of the U.S. mainstream media, to be fair) ended up acknowledging “Mamdani’s Ideas Have Been Tried Before — and Worked”.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/20/mamdani-groceries-politics-turkey-00613292
@YARD
If the analogy used in that article is indeed accurate to Mamdani’s grocery store proposal the quality of the newspaper De Morgen‘s reporting on the USA is even worse* than I had expected it be.
The main reason for my opinion had been beforementioned interview with a pro-Mamdani Belgian immigrant in NYC.
He had defended Mamdani’s grocery store proposal with a claim in the vein of: ‘Genuine capitalism no longer exists in the USA. That grocery prices are so high here is caused by stores conspiring to artificially raise prices; by adding more competition municipally-owned stores will be forced to stop their price fixing.’ Nowhere was it stated that it was supposed to be a targeted relief measure aimed at low-income households…
I concluded such reasoning did not make much sense: grocery is known for its low profit margins, and if anything I suspect in New York City there would even be less opportunity for price fixing as there should be more stores per area greatly increasing the problems faced by a potential cartel that wants to collude to raise prices in the form of defectors or outsiders entering their market undercutting them to increase their market shares.
However, if it indeed was supposed to be a targeted relief measure aimed at low-income households instead of a contrived scheme to force private businesses to lower their prices…
Then let’s just say I had not expected that an interview giving by a Mamdani supporter to a newspaper which itself is pro-Mamdani, based on its opinion columns, would have misunderstood or misexplained Zohran’s platform that much.
Though, in fairness I had, in order to be sure my interpretation was correct, taken a short look at the relevant sections of his platform on his website ( https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform ), and his description of his grocery store plan did not seem inconsistent with my impression from the newspaper interview; for example, it was never mentioned those stores would be only for people whose low-income status had been verified by the city. Though it is possible that was mentioned in the linked nytimes’ article; however, I had not read it as it was behind a login wall.
So, if it indeed was more like the stores in the article you mentioned instead of my first impression I would classify it as ‘could be a good idea, but don’t know enough to judge whether it is cost-effective or has good/bad negative side effects compared with its alternatives’ instead of an obvious bad idea.
* Note, on De Morgen‘s reporting on the USA; I had already noticed that they had not put in enough effort in fact checking. In text they had placed before the interview to provide context they had claimed that ‘in the USA the top 10% of income are responsible for 50% of consumption; income inequality in the USA has never been so high’; two demonstrable falsehoods in the same paragraph**. Though, I had taken that as an indicator of that newspaper’s left-wing bias instead of an omen that they might also be misrepresenting Mamdani’s policies.
** Those statements should be suspicious to respectively anybody with a background in economy or US history; and a few minutes of looking it up should suffice to disprove them.
The top income share of the top decile in the USA is but thirty percent, as the rich tend have higher savings rates their share of consumption is even lower.
( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.10TH.10?locations=US ) and estimated Gini coefficients were not much different in the 2010’s or pre-WWII ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/inequality?tab=line&country=~USA ).
I assume you are familiar with Will Stancil (a semi-frequent mutual of our host on Bluesky), since this here is effectively his theory of American politics? Then again, it’s hardly a new idea: in Russia, the opposite phenomenon had been described by the opposition writers as “the battle of the fridge and the TV set” starting from at least the mid-2010s. That is, after the “Crimean reunification” in particular, they were wondering out loud at which point the average person in Russia would pay more attention to fewer, worse foodstuffs in their fridges as the proof economic situation getting worse, as opposed to listening to “the TV” (unlike the U.S., the majority of Russians had received most of their news through TV, via the state-run channels, until fairly recently) telling them things are only getting better. As we know now, the pandemic and the war largely rendered the question moot.
I do think that a missing variable here is that it is entirely possible for a person to both believe that their own situation is good now, perhaps even extending that to most other people – and that their country as a whole is headed towards collapse in the near future. A French poll taken a little before the pandemic found that out of five developed countries (the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy and Germany) only the latter did not have a majority of the population saying they consider a collapse of civilization more likely than not – in Italy, it was close to three-quarters at 71%!
https://www.jean-jaures.org/publication/la-france-patrie-de-la-collapsologie/
Now, 2019 was at the peak of Extinction Rebellion and therefore of environmental doomerism, so it’s technically possible that the relative decline in (social) media interest since then and the society failing to break down into Mad Max fiefdom over the pandemic (as some doomers appear to have genuinely expected) had improved these numbers. However, I still find this hypothesis rather underinvestigated, relative to its implications – i.e. if it is correct, then the “Stancilist” strategy is targeting the right vector, but the wrong symptom. (And this theory is not even inconsistent with tacit or active Trump support – i.e. it’s entirely possible to both believe in severe climate change and erroneously think that it’s too late to address its causes so keeping out millions of immigrants from the collapsing countries is the best remaining approach, which the U.S. Democrats are too feckless to do.)
No, I don’t think I have ever heard of him; I also nearly never visit Bluesky and don’t have an account there as I think I am already wasting too much time on social media.
I had encountered that theory on r/AskEconomics (I don’t know whether they had it there from Will Stancil, his name had not been mentioned there either AFAIK).
Based on how much ‘the economy is so terrible they had it better in the USA in the 80’s’ I encountered on other subreddits, and also outside of Reddit; I had on a forum even encountered the claim that ‘the US middle class has it so bad that the middle income quintile no longer exists’, despite their proponents not being capable of producing any good data supporting this view*; I presumed it could serve as good null hypothesis until I encountered anything disproving it.
* However, there was bad data supporting this view. For example, I know that somebody claimed that the Bidden administration was underreporting unemployment and that if you calculate a ‘true rate of unemployment’, including among others part-time workers and people who have given up seeking work, you end up with a much higher unemployment rate (https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1iosjcc/from_my_point_of_view_the_people_are_wrong/). However, if you go to the that person’s own website and look at his data you can see that his own ‘true rate of unemployment’ was just like the normal ‘rate of unemployment’ at an all time low during the Bidden administration. Somehow this was still taken over by the social media doomerists…
Part of me also wants to reply about ‘collapsology’; however, it is already late here so better not despite our conversations here being rather interesting and informative.
My understanding of his grocery store policy was to set up a small number of state-run grocery stores in specific areas where various different factors conspire to make privately-run grocery stores unviable, thus creating ‘food deserts’ where residents have to travel significant distances to get access to good quality food (this being both a humanitarian and a public health issue).
This was the drive for it, rather than attempting to drive down the price of food through state-run competition.
I’m also not sure I’d describe capitalists as the victims of NIMBYism (at least here in the UK), considering one of the major issues faced in the UK with house building is developer land speculation due to its scarcity. Developer buys land, holds onto land as it increases in price due to scarcity, then sells it again at an inflated price without having built anything at all (or, borrows against that future price increase).
NIMBYism certainly is a challenge, though I wouldn’t rank it particularly highly. It mainly presents in rural housing developments that are rarely if ever on the ‘affordable’ end of the scale, as opposed to inner-city mass housing options that are both more affordable per-person and utilise land that has far less alternative value economically or ecologically.
That indeed sounds better than my original impression from that newspaper article.
Even should it turn out that those ‘food deserts’ are primarily caused by a lack of demand, maybe nearby people lack the time to prepare healthy food and get their children to eat it, it would still be less bad than my original impression.
In hindsight, I should not have allowed a single newspaper article to colour my perception so much, even if I had originally thought that they should not deliberately misrepresent Mamdani’s policies as they cheered him on.
That would also have saved me some time writing comments.
I don’t know about the British problems with housing; however, I had referred to the US housing crisis.
Also, I had been talking about ‘capitalists’ as a whole; it is possible for a subset to profiteer from it whilst simultaneously in aggregate the ‘capitalist class’ as whole is hurt by it.
Either way, obviously I much more sympathise with low-income households whose rents rise faster than their incomes than with people already have more much more money than they need anyway.
Not exactly true. I believe the most “establishment” candidate in the race which got Adams elected was Kathryn Garcia, who ran on what seemed like a perfectly workable technocratic platform and would have probably been a decent mayor, but ultimately finished a few points behind Adams. Adams’ campaign was explicitly that of a Democrat more conservative than the party establishment, running not on his experience in government, but his previous career as a veteran police officer, one not afraid to carry guns and “do what it takes” to stop crime. This message is not foolproof since it obviously evokes the specter of police brutality nowadays, but he was able to lean on his biography (before he joined the NYPD, he literally got beaten by them as a teenager) to demonstrate “he gets it”. Not long after getting elected, he very publicly broke with Biden, claiming his mismanagement of the border is destroying the city.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/10/eric-adams-biden-white-house-migrants-00096277
P.S. I suppose it’s worth noting that for most of the race, the leading candidate was a different kind of “anti-establishmentarian” – the crypto freak Andrew Yang who was riding the coattails of his 2020 presidential campaign (much like Ramaswamy is doing the same in Ohio nowadays). That 2020 campaign was almost entirely centered on his promise of a UBI (which would have almost certainly caused the same kind of inflation we saw IRL even in the absence of Covid) and had a slew of “unorthodox” promises with an intended “bipartisan” appeal most ultimately never noticed (i.e. I recall he wanted to offer a preemptive pardon to Trump and to fill the U.S. border with drones) – and yet, he still memed his way past sitting Governors and Senators, including Kamala Harris – which should certainly have made a lot of people in the Democratic establishment think twice about both the viability of their own theory of politics and of making her Vice President but… ¯\_(ツ)_/
I suppose it helps to contextualize how NYC had hardly been a place known for its consistent support of the Democratic establishment, and that goes back for a long time (i.e. Adams’ predecessor, Bill De Blasio, seems rather timid next to post-Bernie progressives in hindsight, but at the time he had defeated both Bloomberg’s handpicked successor (one might argue she was held back by her sexuality, but unless one thinks NYC in 2013 was substantially more prejudiced than South Bend, Indiana in 2015, it’s not very persuasive) and the husband of Hillary Clinton’s aide (before his career was immolated by the underage sexting scandal.)
“(Actually it’s fiercer than that; every class wants to pull down the class above it even if they have to pay to do so, what matters is the *difference* between classes not one’s class’s median income.)”
I don’t think that’s the case. My experience is that blue-collar folks in the past viewed education as a way to get out of blue collar work. It hasn’t always been idealized–folks were proud to be strong and capable, but if you could go from slinging your hammock before the mast to a cabin behind the mast you absolutely did. “I study war so my son can study business so my grandson can study art”, that sort of thing. And the problem with universities is that they no longer do that. Folks can go into tremendous debt (in addition to spending a lot of money in taxes to ostensibly pay for these institutions) in order to get a degree, then end up with lower incomes and lower socio-economic standing than their peers who went into the trades and apprenticeships. That is a betrayal of the social contract our society had with universities.
The other problem is, while that’s going on, society is undergoing radical shifts. A lot of people–cis-gendered heterosexual white males, but also their spouses and small business owners and a few others–used to have a lot of social power, and now we don’t. Our relative status has declined. And that has a LOT of people in these groups very, very upset and worried. They’re lashing out trying to find a way to maintain their status. This is why you see things like tech-bro culture (note the gender), and MAGA (built on the promise of re-centering society on those groups), and even things like TradWives (a total misnomer; the idea is to put women back in their “proper” place). These seem very disparate, but they stem from the same source: Groups that have felt their power slip trying to cling to it.
The former issue is a very serious one that that universities are going to have to address. They’ve lost their place in our society and it’s not clear what their place should be moving forward. Let’s face it, they’re clunky Medieval institutions (literally) that may not fit modern society. The latter issue is serious, in the sense that it’s dangerous and we need to address it, but it’s based on extremely mistaken ideas and the people involved are objectively wrong (it’s based on the idea that a specific race/sex is intrinsically better, which is stupid).
You can see that this isn’t necessarily class-based by the fact that MAGA supports Trump. Trump is, whatever else we may say about him, filthy stinking rich and obscenely powerful. This is the opposite of your typical blue-collar worker. Musk is similar. In fact, most of the icons of this movement are wealthy and powerful (the ones that aren’t become wealthy and powerful). Makes no sense if you view it from a purely Marxist/class-warfare perspective, but it makes perfect sense if you consider that these people are exploiting this desire from certain groups to retain power.
Now isn’t that a bloody good analysis. I think you might be onto something there.
Makes me wonder how that applies to the UK situation, which from an initial glance seems quite different (though may well not be, not sure yet). Need to give it more thought.
Certainly fits a lot of what you see in the States from where I’m sitting. Helps explain some of the more bonkers stuff around folks in crystal-clear positions of privilege trying their damndest to claim they’re victimised (because they’ve assessed that the paradigm at the moment awards increased status to folks who are victimised).
‘white-collar and care sector jobs are now the vast majority – and often sufficiently underpaid or exploited (think nurses, teachers or aged care workers) that they surely more qualify as proletariat than bourgeois. There is, in the US, a voting divide between less-educated males and more educated people, but this is not, in marxian terms, a class divide. Or if it is, it’s between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat.
@PeterT,
I agree with some aspects of your comment here, specifically I think you’re right in pointing out that the Democratic Party is not meaningfully the “bourgeoisie” party, nor is the Republican Party in any sense the “proletarian” party. I’d come down in a different place than you do, though.
Firstly, as much as I think class conflict is a useful way to think about politics and history (not the only useful lens, but one among others), I do think we have to move beyond the idea of trying to sort every person into three or four classes and every society into one of three or four modes of production. Things are more complicated than that. I do think that service-sector jobs are different enough than the classical, traditional ideal of the proletarian that we should treat them as separate things, however poorly service sector workers might be paid (in America, the traditional distinction is “blue collar” versus “pink collar” work, and while I’m not intending that in the gendered sense, I’m also not intending it to be explicitly *not* gendered either: it’s not an accident that the gender gap in US politics is bigger than it’s been for most of the last century).
I also think it’s worthwhile to treat the professional-managerial class as its own, well, class, with distinct interests, objectives and traits, neither “bourgeois” nor “proletarian”. I think we gain more than we lose by complexifying the taxonomy of class a bit (just like I that in pre-industrial societies, in some contexts, it might be useful to think about farmers and herders as different classes as well).
Finally, as important as class is, I don’t think that in present-day US politics that it’s *the most* important thing. Race, religion and other identity issues are more important (for better or worse)- I can do a better job of predicting what your politics are based on those “identity” factors than on what you do for a living. (Which is not that surprising to me: I don’t vote based on identity, in America, because my identity is not a salient issue here, but if I lived in South Asia I would weight those issues more strongly, though they would still of course be balanced against others).
If you ask me the behaviour of the Trump administration, like cutting Medicaid and giving enormous tax cuts to the rich, is more consistent with a class conflict waged by the rich on the poor.
Also, IIRC, in the elections of 2016 and 2020 Trump voters tended to have higher incomes than Clinton or Bidden voters, but I don’t know whether that pattern continued in 2024.
Though, I admit those possibilities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Another possibility I have once witnessed being suggested is a conflict between the elites of rural regions and the elites of urban regions, using cultural issues to mobilise their lower classes for the benefits of their overlords. However, I don’t know enough about US politics to judge the accuracy of that.
That forgets that in the USA an exceptionally high share of federal taxes is paid by the the top 10% and an exceptionally low one by the bottom 50%.
Even such cuts to education could be made to fit ‘a class conflict waged by the rich on the poor’; after all it makes it harder for poor who want it to afford an education. Also, I suspect that cutting education funding would in the long run lead to downward pressure on the wages of lowly educated workers and upward pressure on the wages of highly educated workers; after the supply of highly educated workers, relative to lowly educated workers, should decrease by cutting education.