This was fascinating. Thank you for writing! To be grumpy, it sounds like Parsons' analysis is self-serving -- he is justifying, after the fact, the movement of political power away from decentralized, local business elites to centralized, credentialed managerial elites in DC and NY -- claiming it was inevitable when in fact it wasn't. Is that read unfair? What did he think about Goldwater?
That seems to be his role. Instead of formulating rationalizations for why big changes are bad, he rationalizes them as good. The American Dream's Marx.
As for rationalizations, can't reason somebody out of a position they weren't reasoned into. Hence the dominance games. More robust vs those committed (foolishly) to that reason alone.
Somebody noticed AOC doing this (I call it Stealing the Question) on the gas stoves the other day.
“It seems like the responsibility-taking social strata has abdicated its domestic responsibility. Perhaps the social strata no longer exists.”
It exists the same place in always has in the American context, on the very local/granular level that men like Parsons fled and still do (although over time that set has shifted dramatically to the female).
It seems like Parsons is trying to ingratiate himself into the class he and other social strivers seek to make their own by justifying their half-assed efforts to function as the kind of Euro-aristocracy they aspire to, and the relief from status anxiety that likely drives the whole train.
Meanwhile the responsibility-taking strata has made itself absurd in its efforts to ameliorate its own status anxiety thru taking way too much responsibility (i.e. Promise Keepers) for all kinds of things outside their bailiwick leaving them to fail Odysseus-like at the first and foremost one: maintaining themselves as viable protectors of their families, communities, and traditions.
Yes I wonder whether Parsons is himself on the outside. Although my brief reading of his biography indicates that he was invited into the "Thing" (they wanted him in the OSS), he opted for academia instead. He did remain privy to classified information, however, so he wasn't entirely removed.
This particular article is also self-defensive. The white ethnic FBI investigated him for over a decade, at the same time that he was reviewing foreign academic credentials for the CIA.
Guess I'm something of an outsider along this line myself (Dafoe meme - TIL he was at the Ice Bowl as a twelve-year-old (!) so same there), see also Niebuhr and followers.
The Bohemian (Cocoanut?) Groves of Academe are hardly on the outside though. Maybe he just judged that as his path of least resistance.
Main current concern is figuring out how the Monroe Doctrine got Vindmanned and it's neck and neck between the Curveballs and the strivers from the sticks. Zeke from Cabin Creek is the logo of the whole league now so guess it's on us to clean up the mess. What was Parsons' ethnic background?
Patient Zero looks like that Dude from New York fueled by ancestral Dutch resentment of Hapsburg Altar and Throne and Johnny Come Lately outsiderness vis a vis the Colonial WASP establishment. Augustus FDR finished what Julius TR started.
I like the German ethnonarcissistic treatment of the evolution of the Monroe Doctrine into the opposite of the Monroe Doctrine by Carl Schmitt. It's charitable in the sense that it doesn't attribute the transformation solely to Anglo cynicism.
If it *was* the opposite (reason Bay of Pigs -> Guiado has been so half-hearted?) that ended with the BLM putsch. Interagency Consensus now seems to be that politics stops at both sides of the water’s edge, or that there’s no longer any meaningful edge at all (same difference).
There was (and is!) Anglo cynicism egging it on, but that came/comes principally from the Land of the Engs themselves, not stateside.
The "narcissism of small differences" -- Veblen noted that people envy/hate people just above/below their social strata, but are indifferent to those too far removed. So too, perhaps, with communism and American liberalism. (I tend to think of the former as "nationalist communism" while the latter is "globalist communism"; the latter won out since it was financialized.)
Another interesting strain in his thought is the bit on transitions and the heat they give off. People, groups, and movements all go through something akin to a phase transition when they're on the verge of epiphany or insanity -- when old verities (ways of organizing the moral universe) fall away, it is only natural that new possibilia are generated and then subjected to evolutionary pressure.
Yeah the part where he points to McCarthyites not opposing desegregation and not being anti-semitic as evidence that they're not true anti-Communists was funny.
This was fascinating. Thank you for writing! To be grumpy, it sounds like Parsons' analysis is self-serving -- he is justifying, after the fact, the movement of political power away from decentralized, local business elites to centralized, credentialed managerial elites in DC and NY -- claiming it was inevitable when in fact it wasn't. Is that read unfair? What did he think about Goldwater?
That seems to be his role. Instead of formulating rationalizations for why big changes are bad, he rationalizes them as good. The American Dream's Marx.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
More like inevitable.
As for rationalizations, can't reason somebody out of a position they weren't reasoned into. Hence the dominance games. More robust vs those committed (foolishly) to that reason alone.
Somebody noticed AOC doing this (I call it Stealing the Question) on the gas stoves the other day.
“It seems like the responsibility-taking social strata has abdicated its domestic responsibility. Perhaps the social strata no longer exists.”
It exists the same place in always has in the American context, on the very local/granular level that men like Parsons fled and still do (although over time that set has shifted dramatically to the female).
It seems like Parsons is trying to ingratiate himself into the class he and other social strivers seek to make their own by justifying their half-assed efforts to function as the kind of Euro-aristocracy they aspire to, and the relief from status anxiety that likely drives the whole train.
Meanwhile the responsibility-taking strata has made itself absurd in its efforts to ameliorate its own status anxiety thru taking way too much responsibility (i.e. Promise Keepers) for all kinds of things outside their bailiwick leaving them to fail Odysseus-like at the first and foremost one: maintaining themselves as viable protectors of their families, communities, and traditions.
Yes I wonder whether Parsons is himself on the outside. Although my brief reading of his biography indicates that he was invited into the "Thing" (they wanted him in the OSS), he opted for academia instead. He did remain privy to classified information, however, so he wasn't entirely removed.
This particular article is also self-defensive. The white ethnic FBI investigated him for over a decade, at the same time that he was reviewing foreign academic credentials for the CIA.
Guess I'm something of an outsider along this line myself (Dafoe meme - TIL he was at the Ice Bowl as a twelve-year-old (!) so same there), see also Niebuhr and followers.
The Bohemian (Cocoanut?) Groves of Academe are hardly on the outside though. Maybe he just judged that as his path of least resistance.
Main current concern is figuring out how the Monroe Doctrine got Vindmanned and it's neck and neck between the Curveballs and the strivers from the sticks. Zeke from Cabin Creek is the logo of the whole league now so guess it's on us to clean up the mess. What was Parsons' ethnic background?
Patient Zero looks like that Dude from New York fueled by ancestral Dutch resentment of Hapsburg Altar and Throne and Johnny Come Lately outsiderness vis a vis the Colonial WASP establishment. Augustus FDR finished what Julius TR started.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1951/02/03/the-groves-of-academe
https://erenow.net/modern/theodoreroosevelt/9.php
I like the German ethnonarcissistic treatment of the evolution of the Monroe Doctrine into the opposite of the Monroe Doctrine by Carl Schmitt. It's charitable in the sense that it doesn't attribute the transformation solely to Anglo cynicism.
If it *was* the opposite (reason Bay of Pigs -> Guiado has been so half-hearted?) that ended with the BLM putsch. Interagency Consensus now seems to be that politics stops at both sides of the water’s edge, or that there’s no longer any meaningful edge at all (same difference).
There was (and is!) Anglo cynicism egging it on, but that came/comes principally from the Land of the Engs themselves, not stateside.
His Dark Crown Matériels
The "narcissism of small differences" -- Veblen noted that people envy/hate people just above/below their social strata, but are indifferent to those too far removed. So too, perhaps, with communism and American liberalism. (I tend to think of the former as "nationalist communism" while the latter is "globalist communism"; the latter won out since it was financialized.)
Another interesting strain in his thought is the bit on transitions and the heat they give off. People, groups, and movements all go through something akin to a phase transition when they're on the verge of epiphany or insanity -- when old verities (ways of organizing the moral universe) fall away, it is only natural that new possibilia are generated and then subjected to evolutionary pressure.
The cruelty of big differences. I think Nietzsche called that the pathos of distance.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but Parsons’ “necessities” are more like a Canadian girlfriend.
In the time since his followers have taken on so many baby mammas family court about to bankrupt us all.
Great piece. In summary?
-you have been diagnosed with pathological “not-doing-your-bit”
-mcarthyites are crazy, because if they were rational they would hate Jews
One wonders what Parsons would think about the current grievance industry, or would he find them rational.
I agree that there is no one to take domestic responsibility, because there is no longer a “domestic” to care for
Yeah the part where he points to McCarthyites not opposing desegregation and not being anti-semitic as evidence that they're not true anti-Communists was funny.
Woke are more correct than mainstream foreshadowed