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Notes -
I am reading the first book of 1632, the Isekai/historical novel by Eric Flint.
Basically, a West Virginia fictional town is teleported in the year 1632, during the Thirty Years War, and the usual scenario happen, technology triumph on the less advanced, the future breeds social and economical innovation, a cast of character is attracted to the colonists from the future etc
What is very odd is the sentiment that lives in the novel, published in 2000.
Resuming it in bullet points;
The protagonist is a WASP, no-nonsense ex-coal miner, who has the dream of rebuilding a new USA in Germany, with a Constitution, a Bill of Rights etc. He marries a Sephardic Jew girl.
His political enemy is another WASP, but this time from the East Coast, rich guy with a pretty wife, xenophobic and anti-immigration, but that is constantly criticised for being a de-facto "globalist". ("He is not from this town, he is a rich dude who lived in London and Canada and everywhere else without stopping!")
The heroes of the story are the local members of the UMWA union, a mix of WASP and Italian and Irish coal miners, who defend the town first and are the major supporters of the protagonist's agenda.
There is a character in the protagonist ruling council, who is a 50s WASP feminist woman famous for being an ex-radical Ivy-League student who tossed Molotovs around and turned high-school teacher. She is one of the main supporters of the protagonist, always bickering with him or the UMWA, but in the end she is always supported by them.
There are a bunch of female characters who during the story demonstrate intelligence, combat attitudes etc, and the protagonist, despite having some small moral problems at the beginning, supports them in their actions and dreams.
The oddness is reading a novel, written by a Liberal with in mind the liberalism of the late 90s. The white coal miners are all union supporters and pro-immigration, the feminists like them, and the very-white West Virginian town is lauded as an impoverished but proud and tight community hostile to the rich bastards from the big cities. Diversity is not nominated apart from two or three times. The greatest oddity, by the way, is the lingering anti-Catholic sentiment, where the majority of the Catholics are closed-minded, and anti-freedom of religion, while the Protestants are essentially the good guy.
What an odd time machine.
I've read a decent number of books from that series. IMO, much of the political development reflects the somewhat oddball politics of Eric Flint himself, at least in this day and age. He seems to be a more classical socialist, who identifies with the actual working class, in contrast to most of the modern self-proclaimed socialists who seem to consider them icky commoners to be despised. The attitudes WRT racial and religious tolerance, the place of women, etc displayed seem to be pretty typical IMO of 90s-era Red Tribe blue-collar workers.
It does come off as a bit of fresh air IMO compared to most contemporary casual fiction.
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As someone who was planning to get into 1632 but never got the time, does anybody know the future of the series after Flint's death? Will they just finish the books that were already being made and end it early or will it continue?
Apparently, "any projects not already under contract by Baen Books will need to be approved by [Flint's widow and heir] Lucille Robbins, who will be working with Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf and several of Eric’s collaborators to make sure Eric’s intentions for the series are kept". So the series presumably will continue.
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There was a lot of 'liberal/left/progressive' pro-Union rhetoric in the US that got upended when the anti-black anti-immigration history of the unions was popularized in the new era of anti-white academia and media. The thing is that, unlike a lot of the anti-white stuff, there is a pretty solid historical base to make those arguments.
You literally can't have implicitly white and oikophilic unions. As history shows they will be at odds with uncontrolled influx of labor since new labour is a direct threat to their ability to leverage the value of theirs at the negotiation table, as well as being a direct threat to the sanctity of their 'home'. That was the case with freed slaves from the South coming into the American labour markets and it has been the case with the huge amounts of skilled and unskilled labour flooding the western world from the third. The end result is that you don't get to have effective unions in an international economy. 'Big business' can and will always leverage the new labour to get what they want.
If you look at the decline of American unions it's not the case that we still have all the steel mills and auto plants only now they're worked by unionized immigrants. Plants being closed and moved to where there are large populations of low wage workers seems a much bigger factor. Automation also played a big role.
Germany of course still has a lot of unionized manufacturing but they have a sectoral bargaining system that's pretty different from America's.
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While there are characters with anti-Catholic sentiment (and any number with a pretty fierce hatred of Catholics, as you should expect in the middle of the Thirty Years' War), the 'series' is definitely not anti-Catholic.
A major protagonist of one of the branching sub-series is Father Larry Mazzare, Grantville's local Catholic priest. Turns out, it's kind of a big deal when Urban VIII gets a written summary of Vatican II. What follows includes a fair amount of swashbuckling drama--because that's part of the genre--but also an in-depth exploration of faith, obedience, and consequences, both by Father Mazzare and Urban VIII. Urban is not a villain, and neither (despite the visual cues) is his black-robed vizier, Mutio Vitelleschi, sixth Father General of the Society of Jesus. The Spanish, on the other hand....
The 163x collection of books ('series' is a bit inapt, as many of the later books occur in parallel, though in different areas) has several very solid entries, particularly near the beginning. IMO, 1633 is better than 1632, for instance. But the quality of the various branches varies pretty widely; the Catholic/Southern European branch that follows Larry Mazzare and starts with 1634: The Galileo Affair is one of the better ones, but I'd avoid the ones involving Virginia DeMarce.
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I’m cooking up a post about how the American left has historically consisted of two very distinct factions - Populists and Elitists/Futurists - and how a theoretical realignment of political tribes in this country might pit a coalition of working-class whites and Hispanics - the Populist coalition, headed by a Trump-like caudillo figure who is more favorable toward Latin American immigration than Trump was - against a white/Asian/Indian/Jewish urban Elitist coalition that has re-embraced old Progressive ideas such as eugenics.
The sort of labor-oriented, anti-elitist brand of leftism you see in this book hearkens back to the early-20th century, pre-Gramscian, non-Leninist socialist labor movement championed by guys like Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, Eugene Debs, and to some extent Huey Long. In the 21st-century context, that coalition remains uncomfortably welded with elements of the Elitist coalition, although Trump’s great triumph was peeling off a substantial portion of that element. When Bernie Sanders at long last succumbed to the political necessities of Democratic politics in 2020 and embraced the racial/gender policy preferences of the left-elitists within the party, I saw it as a particularly grievous stab-in-the-back of the populist faction that he’d always seen himself as a crusader for. (Whether or not a Brooklyn Jew and old-school Civil Rights activist can stake a legitimate claim to speak for that coalition is a complicated question, and one which I will grapple with in my post.)
A big factor in that transformation is that organized labor, and especially manufacturing unions, declined dramatically (due to deindustrialization mostly but also under attack from the right). The unions that have gained power like the SEIU have pretty different gender demographics then the old unions that used to dominate the Democratic Party.
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Another huge difference between the 1632 series and modern leftist fiction is that 1632 is relentlessly optimistic. People get killed, stuff blows up, the bad guys make gains, but these are problems to be solved and they in fact WILL be solved, or at least put on a path to be solved. Our Heroes have the advantages, they WILL use them, and in doing so they will attract other competent good guys; the bad guys ultimately don't stand a chance.
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I re-watched "Harlan County, USA" recently and it's similar in that the white coal miners are pretty unambiguously heroic. It's a documentary made by a female NY college graduate.
With all the talk here about some inherent polarization between symbol manipulators and people who work with physical objects it's worth remembering that the labor movement kept a lot of people who worked with their hands in the Democratic Party (if not the blue tribe) until deindustrialization. A young NY college grad didn't see herself as a culture enemy of union coal miners at the time.
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“The greatest oddity, by the way, is the lingering anti-Catholic sentiment, where the majority of the Catholics are closed-minded, and anti-freedom of religion, while the Protestants are essentially the good guy.”
That was pretty much common around 9/11. Anti Catholicism is common in Anglo societies
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This was typical liberalism in the 90s. (Remember Bill Clinton?)
Eric Flint is a Red Tribe author, notwithstanding his socialism, and a good example of how "red tribe/blue tribe" doesn't always map neatly to "conservative/liberal."
I do, but ironically I would point to Bill Clinton (or rather his administration) as the ones who killed the old form of liberalism and put the Democratic party on it's current path by exiling the "blue dogs" and turning the DNC into the party of urban technocrats. 9/11 might have put things on hold for a decade but current battles over wokeness are still best understood as the chickens of the 90 coming home to roost.
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Eric Flint is a socialist according to his web site and it's my understanding that he is a specific type of socialist whose name I can't remember, that is positive towards laborers and negative towards the upper classes.
I think that's Groucho Marxism. The only reason you'd take action consistent with not wanting to belong to a group (in this case, the capital classes) that would have people like you as members only makes sense if you a.) have an active invitation, and b.) tacitly understand what accepting the invitation does/means.
(That quote about "Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" is designed to refute this specific political outlook- it's used a few different ways, but this is the root.)
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I remember getting called out in one of the weekly threads for lumping Eric Flint in with a list of right-wing Baen authors. I was basing that assessment off a half-remembered flip of one of the later 1632 books. The concentrated "America, fuck yeah" was so earnest. Combined with the attitudes towards self-reliance and firearms and I was sure it was fishing for a right-leaning audience.
Apparently Eric Flint is a card carrying Trotskyite and has a long, long history with labor movements. Coal country looked really different, politically, in the 90s. I have a suspicion that this has something to do with the combined cycle natural gas plant and the course of US energy policy up to the recession.
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