Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

The MAGA case against Trump

23 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.

Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)

All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.

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What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

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My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

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Our home and native land

04 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

Photo of Buck Lake by Wikipedia user P199, CC BY-SA 4.0

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

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Of perpetually vulnerable subjects

10 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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The scattershot application of “neoliberalism” is at its worst when the term gets applied to mindfulness meditation. We saw before how Ron Purser described mindfulness meditation as “neoliberal”. What is that supposed to mean? Modern meditation is frequently described as “neoliberal” in the Handbook of Mindfulness, which Purser coedited, and especially the closing essay by Glenn Wallis (which responds to a thoughtful defence of mindfulness by Rick Repetti in the same volume). Wallis’s piece is a good illustration of how a concept with some legitimate and meaningful uses can get bandied around so casually that it becomes completely specious. Here is Wallis:

You don’t have to look too closely to see that Mindfulness’s most recent progenitors are, of course, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As I mentioned earlier, Mindfulness has the same DNA and was raised on the same values that undergirds today’s neoliberal, consumer capitalist social structure (acceptance, resilience, self-help, etc.). So, of course Jon Kabat-Zinn [the creator of secularized and medicalized mindfulness meditation] cozies up to corporate CEOs and American military generals. (Wallis 499)

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How neo is neoliberalism?

13 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in Economics, Pleasure, Politics, Work

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The terms neoliberal and neoliberalism have become ubiquitous in left-wing discourse of the past few years, ranging from discussions of government policy to critiques of mindfulness meditation. They merit a closer look.

Credit for the terms usually goes back to Michel Foucault, in his lectures collected as The Birth of Biopolitics. What is extraordinary about these lectures is that they took place in early 1979 – before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would take office and implement the sweeping right-wing libertarian-capitalist economic reforms to which the term “neoliberal” is now most often applied. So while 21st-century writing about neoliberalism aims to describe an ideology that shapes the actions of government and social institutions, Foucault was merely writing about an ideology found in the writings of mid-20th-century German and American economists (most notably Friedrich Hayek). For this reason, Foucault now comes to look prescient – but his writing on the subject takes on a very different cast from 21st-century writers, since he is only describing a theory, and they aim to describe a practice.

There are many things to be said about the concept of neoliberalism. First off, it is an unfortunately confusing term, in the North American context at least. It probably makes sense in Australia, where the Liberal Party is the right-wing party. And the ideas and practices described as “neoliberal” do occur on both sides of the political spectrum. But the opposition to neoliberalism comes largely from people on the political left, people whom the vast majority of ordinary Americans and Canadians would still describe as – liberal.

Still, the term is in widespread use on the left now, and however confusing the term is, the bigger question is the phenomenon the term claims to describe: a phenomenon which is supposedly a new (neo) transformation of the market-oriented political ideas that have in the past gone under the name “liberal”. So we may ask of neoliberalism: is it liberal – at least in the broad sense in which Reaganite right-wingers are liberal? And is it neo – what about it is new?

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How to reach a colour-blind society

02 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

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Perhaps the best-known quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The kind of society that King dreams of in this sentence is often called “colour-blind” – in a meaning referring not literally to the disability, but to skin colour being irrelevant to people’s lives and the way society judges them. Prince Ea’s wonderful “I am not black, you are not white” video, which I cited as an exemplar of qualitative individualism, further expresses the ideal of colour-blindness: race is just a label that diminishes who we really are. For my own qualitative individualist reasons, it is an ideal I endorse.

In recent years, though, the concept of racial colour-blindness has come under attack. And I do believe that one strand of this attack is entirely justified.

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Literal conservatism

22 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Place, Politics

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Note (12 Jul 2022): This post, written in 2010, contains a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In that quote is a six-letter derogatory term for black people, which has become much more taboo since I wrote the post. I include this note so that the term’s appearance in the King quote does not hit readers as a surprise.

A flip side of the previous post: while I am not a right-winger and would never want to be called one, I have far less antipathy to the term “conservative,” and sometimes even describe myself that way. For at least to some extent, I see myself as a conservative in the literal sense of that word.

Literal conservatism is a view I have found increasingly appealing after the radical political transformations of the ’80s and (in the US) the ’00s – this not despite, but because of, my left-wing convictions on many particular issues. The literal meaning of the word “conservative” should be fairly obvious: it is about conserving, preserving, existing states of affairs. That’s what it would have meant in the time of Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism. The problem with the word is that in the ensuing two centuries, the world has changed drastically in ways that Burke would have wished it hadn’t. And that means that if one wants the kind of society that Burke tended to advocate – especially if one wishes “small government” – one will need to change society in quite drastic ways from what it has become. Which, in turn, means not being conservative – not in the literal sense of the world.
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