Lewis
9mo ago
Thanks for the link! I’ll have to see if I can find anything on the monarchism. I’m sure it would make for a fascinating read.
Lewis
9mo ago
That is interesting. Do you know what group that was? I know there were a few… attempts, if you can call it that; it would probably be more accurate to say idle day-dreams… to create a new Germany in the Midwest (every one of which fizzled out almost immediately as the immigrants realized that the USA was actually pretty great). I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Texas, but then I’m only really familiar with a couple of German communities down there.
Lewis
9mo ago
You are correct, and I shouldn’t have glossed over that distinction. The pietistic German Lutherans and Reformed tended to assimilate much more quickly than their Catholic and traditional Lutheran counterparts, with many joining Methodist or Baptist churches, supporting Prohibition, opposing parochial schools, and rather quickly dropping their “hyphenated” German-American identities, in many cases anglicizing their names in the process. These were much more likely to join the Republican party prior to WWI. The German freethinkers, with their singing and athletic clubs, were even more strongly Republican.
The Republicans actually had some decent success in courting traditional Lutherans and Catholics, but they had a habit of shooting themselves in the foot every couple of years and driving those groups back to the Democrats. Prohibition was the longest-lived issue, causing friction from the 1850s until the passage of the 18th Amendment, with the Republicans typically in favor and the Democrats typically opposed. Then in 1889, Illinois and Wisconsin passed laws requiring children to attend English-speaking schools, which led to a massive backlash from the traditional German communities and concomitant electoral victories for the Democrats. (There had already been quite a few skirmishes over Bible reading and prayer in the public schools before then, which an uneasy alliance of Catholics, traditional Lutherans, and German freethinkers opposed.)
Interestingly, the Scandinavians, being mostly Pietistic, were a pretty reliable Republican vote early on, though that naturally shifted over the years as the parties changed.
In Indiana, there was an additional wrinkle in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan popped up in the state during WWI, then flourished massively in the early 1920s, before dying off just as quickly as it had grown. Unlike in the south, the Indiana Klan was not primarily an anti-black organization, but was anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic, with animosity toward traditional Lutherans typically thrown in with those last two. The Klan was technically bipartisan but was more closely associated with the Republicans, which probably hampered the German vote’s transition to that party.
Lewis
9mo ago
I believe the Germans were mostly Democrats during the peak periods of German immigration. The liberal, largely atheistic Forty-Eighters were almost all Republicans, but they were, despite their outsized cultural influence, a tiny minority of German immigrants. The majority were conservative Catholics and Lutherans who had little use for the Republican party. The midwestern German-Americans began to warm up to the Republicans before WWI, but they didn’t switch en mass until after.
Lewis
9mo ago
That image doesn’t quite work since the Germans were still a very heavily Democratic constituency on the eve of WWI. In fact, Wilson’s about-face (campaigning on “he kept us out of war” and then entering it against the Germans) was one factor that led the German-American vote to become much more Republican.
Lewis
9mo ago
You know, if I wanted to write an Ayn Rand-style novel about the evils of immigration, I could copy this and paste it almost verbatim into the mouth of one of the villains. I don’t say this out of any personal animus, but keeping out people with your selfish, exploitative, disloyal attitude is the single largest reason I want heavy restrictions on immigration. Whatever economic benefit you bring to the United States, I firmly believe the country would be better off forgoing it if it meant we would have fewer people like you. Call my attitude irrational, nativistic, whatever—when the chips are down, I and millions of Americans will make sacrifices for our communities and our country, while it’s pretty clear you’ll skip out to somewhere better the first chance you get.
Lewis
9mo ago
Hmm, maybe in part. I don’t have a problem giving or receiving explicit gifts. It’s the ambiguous nature of the paying-for-each-others’-meals arrangement that has always slightly bothered me (are these gifts or is the understanding that it will all even out in the end?). That and the fact that I dislike spending extra money on eating and drinking out. Plus it’s not something I grew up with. Even my extended family goes Dutch on the few occasions we all go out together.
Lewis
9mo ago
You mean you’d feed him yourself and deprive his family of family dinner? Barbarism! Once dinner is ready, that’s the signal for your child’s friend to go home. Now, there are exceptions, of course, if you’ve previously made arrangements with the kid’s parents to serve him dinner at your house—say after a game or something. Also, on reflection, I think the lower and lower middle class kids were (and presumably still are) more likely to eat dinner at their friends’ houses. But not, in my experience, the middle middle class kids. They’ll just get snacks if they’re lucky. I should clarify that I’m speaking from a rural/very small town Midwest perspective. Things are probably different in the cities.
Lewis
9mo ago
If you don’t mind my asking, whereabouts did you grow up in the States? I’m a bit younger than you, but I also know that my parents never ate dinner at their friends’ houses growing up either. When my dad was young, one of my grandma’s neighbors would ring a farm bell when it was getting close to supper, which was the signal for all the kids in the neighborhood to go home.
This is probably mostly a personality thing, but I hate the “I’m buying this time” culture that is pretty much standard both in America and also it seems in most of the English-speaking world. I hate it in part for OCD type reasons that David Mitchell lays out here, but also because I’m quite frugal by nature, which hurts both when I’m paying and when I’m not. When someone else is paying, I feel the need to keep my tab to a minimum, so as not to impose. When I’m paying, I still keep my tab to a minimum, since I’d rather not waste my money on eating out. My friends, on the other hand, don’t share my frugality, so they’ll happily order more expensive items regardless of whether they’re paying, which means I always end up paying extra to cover their profligacy. I much prefer the Dutch system.
Lewis
9mo ago
It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.
Surely that’s true in America as well, right? Or is this an area where Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians have retained something of their ancestral culture? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of people serving dinner to their kids’ friends.
Lewis
9mo ago
He’s German. If there’s anything I’d expect from a German, it’s a meticulously tidy and organized home. I used to know a German lady who even swept her front porch and sidewalk on a daily basis.
Lewis
9mo ago
Indiana’s questionable. SSM was forced on the state by court order shortly before Obergefell, it has no legal protections for LGBT people seeking housing or accommodations, and it has Republican supermajorities in both houses. Missouri’s similar, as it also lacks LGBT protections and has Republican supermajorities. Kansas and Nebraska would probably be more likely to vote for it, but they have some of the same factors.
Texas would shock me, given how much its Republican governor and legislature have been leaning into the culture war. I think Tennessee and Arkansas would also very likely refuse to hold a vote, since, according to this site, barely over half the population of each state supports SSM, and I’m guessing support is substantially lower among the Republican base. Heck, I could see both states outright banning SSM if given the opportunity. Kentucky has a bit more public support for SSM, but I could easily its legislature sitting on the issue as well.
One important thing to consider is that no state would even need to hold a vote on the issue. If the legislature just doesn’t discuss it, nothing happens. And in that case, no Republicans would need to worry about getting primaried for voting in favor of a constitutional amendment, and few if any legislators would be electorally punished for their lack of action. Inaction is the easiest path for any legislator or legislature to take.
Lewis
9mo ago
Also, conservatives are quite happy to read the works of old, dead, white men, of which there are already plenty. The lack of new sci-fi is less of a problem for them than it would be for progressives.
Lewis
9mo ago
I don’t even see all of those states passing such an amendment. They might not ban same sex marriage again (though I could see it from one or two of them), but they’re definitely not all passing a bill in favor of SSM.
Lewis
9mo ago
It might be possible to pass an amendment banning federal politicians from owning stocks though. How many state legislators actually have federal ambitions? Probably not the majority.
Lewis
9mo ago
I don’t think “anti-racism” is the right term. I think you’re looking for “abolitionism.” It’s very possible to be an abolitionist and a racist at the same time. By today’s standards, pretty much every abolitionist at the time of the American Civil War was a racist of the worst kind.
Lewis
9mo ago
Short shorts are a bit tricky. They could just as easily be a return to masculine styles of the 1970s and earlier, rather than a feminization of modern clothing.
Lewis
10mo ago
According to the U.N.’s definition, yes. As were 9/11, various other terrorist attacks, the aftermath of the Armenia/Azerbaijan war, etc. Now, you could argue that this definition is so expansive as to be useless (and I’d agree if you did), but it’s the one that the international community has been using for the past 75 years.
Lewis
10mo ago
How about sniping two women walking inside a church courtyard, as happened just before Christmas? Seems pretty indiscriminate and militarily indefensible to me, yet for some reason, the Israeli government doesn’t seem to mind.
Lewis
10mo ago
Those people work with a very loose definition of genocide.
Blame the U.N. Since 1948, it has defined genocide as
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It also criminalizes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.” Some of the speeches by Israeli politicians clearly fall afoul of the former, while, if what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, the United States’ actions would arguably fall afoul of the latter.
Lewis
10mo ago
True in some fields (sports writing, for example), less true in others. What non-woke group has the financial capacity and coordination ability to produce new worthwhile movies and TV shows? Who can compete with Disney, Netflix, or Amazon? No one, not even the Daily Wire, so when those companies choose to produce only woke content, consumers’ options are either consume that material, or consume nothing.*
*That is, nothing new, which doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother most people. If I chose to consume only public domain movies, books, music, etc., it would still take me multiple lifetimes to run out of new material.
But that just goes back to institutional capture. What you’re essentially saying is that the protests are irrelevant and impotent, which, while quite possibly true, is a different problem from them being incompetently held.
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