Adorno?

Everybody in my family always said that the years 1953-1964 were the Golden Years in the US and particularly CA. Given what has happened since then it is hard to say they were wrong.

The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Those damn hippies again. Is there anything they couldn’t do?

Just because I’m an American doesn’t mean I understand them. . . but I would have thought that myth #2 was a specialty of the modern conservative: The South was not particularly racist, the North was just as bad, the War was less about race and slavery than about. . . I don’t know, states rights and cheap cotton.

Do I have my conservative grudges mixed up?

I’ve never met anyone for whom the Kennedy assassination is more than simply a terrible span of events. It looks from this distance more like the killing of John Lennon than a poltical act. Northern racism seems to me to be a given, but there’s neither the need nor the foresight to put a calipers on it. And the quality of popular culture is hardly something to build a political movement around. (Popular movies and music deserved to be gutted, and high art has been floundering since the early 20s. )

Why not just assume that liberalism is founded on the idea of using our political institutions to ameliorate pain?

Marxant? Is anyone else surprised that this isn’t actually a word except in Catalan?

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27536/pg27536.html

Does Siegel suppose that there isn’t anything wrong with us that a little Rudy Giuliani couldn’t fix? And is he aware that a little is all we’re likely to get these days?

It’s not that I prefer Newt Gingrich’s comprehensive history of liberal malfeasance, mind you, but it does seem to have been earliest onto the shelves. It also seems to have the largest advertising budget the Free World has ever assembled. The Republican Marketplace of Ideas is Perfectly Rational. Maybe someone should write a book about that.

Just to be a devil’s advocate there is a kernel of truth in here somewhere. For example, the New Yorker used to be attacked and mocked as too safe and mainstream, yet in retrospect it seems pretty good. Similarly, I don’t know if the lifting of the taboos on violence, cursing, and explicit sex in popular media has really brought about that much of an improvement. Not that I would advocate a return to the mechanistic censorship codes of yore.

BTW, John, have you ever thought about updating your review of Frum’s ‘Dead Right’?
His predictions that the right basically wouldn’t actually try to implement ‘Donner Party’ conservatism are 100% wrong.

I know the third myth, but mostly from Ariel Dorfman’s Para leer al Pato Donald. The other two are hardly foundational to American liberalism in even the remotest meaning of the word foundational.

Anyway, leftist and liberal attitudes toward popular culture are very complex and can’t be reduced to the bizarrely simplistic narrative presented here. Some liberal myths include Elvis appropriating Black culture, etc…

Is Myth One (a) genuinely believed by American liberals and (b) demonstrably false? It was reported at the time–yes, I’m old enough to have been reading the daily papers in November 1963–that when the assassination was announced over PA systems in Dallas high schools, students cheered. Ask any African-American who was alive at the time if they didn’t think to themselves “Wouldn’t you know it, those damn crackers got him” or something of the kind, followed in fairly short order by “but you know, these crackers up here are just as bad.” What Siegel lists as foundational myths of American liberalism, and John Holbo and several commenters disavow, are regarded by (at least) some of our fellow-Americans as plain good sense, acquired through bitter experience and passed along from one generation to the next.
As for popular culture, it’s always smug and narrow, even when-especially when–it flatters itself it’s revolutionary and inclusive; the 50’s, once you got beyond the popular culture, were the era of bebop and New York School painting, among other things, marginal to popular culture then and ignored by the popular culture of the 60’s too.

Man, have I ever been remiss in attending to my inner life.

For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes.

Ah, yes, that new vast middle class with the means to “elevate their tastes.” A product of an era of very high marginal tax rates and strong labor protections, both of which the aristocratic sociopaths of the AEI dedicated themselves to destroying from the beginning. So yeah, it’s all the fault of hippies.

Rich, if it wasn’t clear, I was agreeing with you and pointing out that J. Otto was being a troll (by stating a quarter-truth whose “on the other hand” is well known).

Truly bizarre. Anyone alive at the time of the Kennedy assassination recalls the massive outpouring of grief. Rank intolerance and hatred? The Kennedys were idolized into near deities.

I don’t recall liberals equating the North and South in racism. Most often, liberals sneered at the South while minimizing northern racism. Blacks recognized the difference in the quality of regional racism. Dick Gregory: “In the South they don’t care how close I get as long as I don’t get too big. In the North they don’t care how big I get as long as I don’t get too close.”

The 60s did include attempts to break the banality of 50s popular culture. Those attempts were subverted and co-opted by the increasing power of mass media. When I was 17 I moved into a collective (highly political rather than “hippie”). Conservative adults had no interest in our politics, their interest was all about “free love” and salacious questions about hippie chicks. Mass culture happily exploited the most superficial aspects of counter-culture (I hate the word but can’t think of anything else concise). It was “fuck” but never “fuck the government.” The Situationists understood the vitality of the “spectacle” in turning subversion into marketable product.

J. Otto:

I suppose I might point out that the 1950s and early sixties were pretty good years and a golden age for people other than White Middle Class people in the US.

You might point that out, but since your original post explicitly refers to the US, it wouldn’t really be addressing everybody’s objections.

Everybody in my family always said that the years 1953-1964 were the Golden Years in the US and particularly CA. Given what has happened since then it is hard to say they were wrong.

One of the things I have done in the last fifty years is get a better feeling about the mass popular culture in the US in 50’s (although not about the direction movies were taking, particularly in comparison to the thirty years previously). The net result of that for me has not been hippy bashing but an increased distaste for the influence of the very people who fund the AEI.

On who the 50’s were and were not a golden age for, the partners in my father’s law firm (Berlin, O’Grady and Goodman) were certainly under the impression that they were able to do things and find acceptance in, say 1956, that would have been unavailable to them before the war, or perhaps before 1950. On the other hand, it’s possible that elite academic institutions lagged behind — I once asked Sid Berlin how it happened that he’d gone to a Catholic law school (Santa Clara) instead of UC Berkeley, and he said that he couldn’t have handled the anti-Semitism in the Berkeley law school.

I’m tired of people treating this sentiment as if it’s a “gambit”. It’s pretty much impossible to understand 20th and 21st century America if you don’t understand why “1953-1964 were the Golden Years in the US” for only middle-class white people.

I’m mystified by this, which I see all the time. This decade, with the the 5 years or so on either side, was a period when the working class however defined did better than at any point before or since. And as regards race, we have
Brown vs Board of Education 1954
Montgomery bus boycott 1956
Little Rock school integration 1957
University desegregation Alabama 1963
Civil Rights Act introduced 1963, passed 1964
Voting Rights Act 1965

Those things led straight on to feminism and gay liberation. The bogus idea here seems to me to be the claim of a radical disconnect between the 1950s and 1960s. The real break came with Nixon and the Southern Strategy in 1968, and was complete by the time Ford took over from Nixon. A perfect symbol of the end of the period was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, and the subsequent failure to ratify it.

Back when I was in grad school in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Fred Siegel was a regular attendee of talks in the Princeton History Department. At the time he still called himself a “McGovernite liberal,” though most of his interventions (which tended to be a bit over-the-top) consisted of attacking contemporary liberalism…or at least what he perceived as contemporary liberalism. His self-presentation was all about indicating that he hadn’t left liberalism, liberalism had left him. He was fast becoming the sort of conservative who had been a liberal, but believed he’d been mugged by identity politics.

“J. Otto, you’ve been around long enough that you must know the moves that will be made in response to a gambit like that. (“What if you’re gay?” etc.)”

How easy was it being gay in the 40’s? The 1930’s? Or the 1830’s? I doubt it was any harder in the 1950’s/early 1960’s than it had been before.

Moreover, there are those who have argued that the economic prosperity and and the building of the welfare state (including mass education) in the postwar years were a cause, perhaps even a precondition, for the social liberalization that followed in the next decades. At least the connection between the welfare state and women’s liberation seems clear enough.

re:32
“The Kennedys were idolized into near deities.”

That really depends upon where you lived. Tom Wolfe reports about a grade school class erupting in cheers when they heard he’d been shot. (IIRC, in Texas).

The assassination helped the deification. That happens. Elvis was a grotesque joke when he died. Ditto Michael Jackson. As they’ve said, “Good career move.”

How easy was it being gay in the 40’s? The 1930’s? Or the 1830’s? I doubt it was any harder in the 1950’s/early 1960’s than it had been before.

That’s highly debatable.

Wonderful. Still getting my breath back. With a bit more of this, I won’t have to miss Michael Berube’s acerbic wit quite as much as I do.

J. Otto, you are trolling. Decolonization? You started out talking about the U.S., people responded in terms of the U.S., and you can’t now bait-and-switch and pretend that people were making claims about the whole world.

Let’s compare “1953-1964 were the Golden Years in the US” to John Quiggin’s list of civil rights triumphs. The Golden Age evidently ended right when the Civil Rights Act passed — and right when earlier victories in the educational system were actually being applied.

And if you’re going to treat this period as the necessary precursor to feminism, it’s the necessary precursor to the Southern Strategy too. For good or bad, U.S. history in the succeeding periods can’t be understood unless you understand why 1953-1964 were not in fact a Golden Age for everyone.

Hitting the google, Dwight and Donald Duck doesn’t come up, but Adorno does – from CT, to be sure:
“Josh Glenn 10.21.09 at 4:35 pm
It’s bizarre to hear “genteel” used as a compliment, and to see the Frankfurt School and other intellectuals blamed for fucking up prewar European culture! Not sure where to begin with the first, but as for the latter, let’s lay to rest the shibboleth that Adorno hated lowbrow/popular culture. As I’ve repeated too many times, Adorno “enjoyed unique and eccentric lowbrow productions — which he described as being every bit as ‘embarrassing’ to the coercive aims of the Disneyfied culture industry as were those highbrow works (e.g., Schoenberg) for which he is a better-known advocate.”
For example: “The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them … calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop” (Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception”). This is not a rejection of all pop/lowbrow; A&H (primarily Adorno, I think) is here criticizing Disneyfied (low middlebrow) productions. ”
Speaking for myself, while there are some Boops that I would prefer to some (later) Ducks, I have to say that looking at the corpus it’s unarguably the Duck. Even without counting in Carl Barks.
Adorno or no Adorno.

several posters have noted how the 50s wern’t that bad
except if you were black
or gay
or a woman who wanted a career
or a handicapped person who wanted to use a city bus
or a jew who wanted to get into harvard (harvard had a *written* quota; my grandfather, admittedly in the 30s, would drive straight from NYC to Montreal on vacation, a long way on those roads, because many of the hotels in New England were restricted)

At least one poster talks about the grief after dallas; that may be true, but their were “wanted, dead or alive” posters on dallas lamposts

As to the idea that mainstream (not newyork schoool, not Bird jazz) culture was anything but repulsive, well, you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in brooklyn I can sell you cheap. Of course, it is no worse then middle class culture today, people who live in suburbs and hire gardeners with leafblowers to destroy the peace and quiet, people who think starbucks is cool and not a corporate ad campaign attuned to those who denigrate the 50s…

Henri Vieuxtemps (have we established whether he is the composer and violinist of that name?) points toward a question one would like to see clarified in such discussions. When we praise or dispraise ’50s “culture” in this sense, we usually mean either some selected bits, or the whole thing (which is then vulnerable to criticism based on other selected bits). But is there a way to name something intermediate — a constellation of bits, with an intuited coherence behind them, implying more bits? If we praise ancient Athenian culture, is there a fabric we can meaningfully highlight while backgrounding e.g. the slavery (and all the things we don’t know about Athens)? Some lesser order of infinity, as it were, standing in relation to the totality of Athens as the rational numbers stand to the reals?

How easy was it being gay in the 40’s? The 1930’s? Or the 1830’s? I doubt it was any harder in the 1950’s/early 1960’s than it had been before.

I know this is meant as a rhetorical device, but in fact a fairly compelling argument can be made that being gay in the 1950’s was considerably worse than being gay just a few decades earlier, at least in some parts of the country. A good place to start on this story is George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, especially the final chapter on the regressions of the 1930’s.

Right after WW II the USA didn’t have “In God We Trust” on its money. American citizens accused of crimes couldn’t be imprisoned or executed without trial. There was no existing or proposed legislation to outlaw gay marriage or flag burning. Unions were much freer to shape and maintain conditions of employment beneficial to their members. Retail and investment banking were separated by law. There was no War on Drugs, no Federal Analog Act, no mandatory sentencing. I approve of the way those things were in the past. If I would like to conserve those things, perhaps I should support US politicians calling themselves conservative???

Ben Alpers @ 40
Hm, maybe you knew my ALM adviser.

Rich Puchalsky, I’m honestly not following you. Obviously, the successes of the 1950s and 1960s were the precondition both for further successes (such as feminism and gay rights) and for the Nixon reaction against those successes. What inference do you draw from this? That the successes are to be deplored?

63: if one bothers to read him carefully

The quip that launched a thousand theses.

@65:

Really, John Emerson?
“The” Kurt Goedel? The guy who thought that general relativity could be used to prove the non-existence of time? Who manifested considerable obsessive and paranoid behavior in his later American years? “So much wiser”? Based on disparaging Viennese classical music in favor of American pop? (What would old Ludwig have to say about that, who loved popular American detective pulp and cowboy movies?) Do you have any intelligible criteria to offer to support your judgment?

Look, the central problem with this Jonathan Livingston Siegel character is that he, like all reactionaries, conflates everything to the left of Attila the Hun into the epithet “liberal”. Which just turns everything he says into nonsense. How could all liberals have despised all mass culture when some of them were figuring out dodges to get their blacklisted friends screenwriting gigs? He really should just say “rootless cosmopolitans” if that’s what he means.

When you’re dealing with the abysmally low degree of ratiocination evinced by Bircher schmucks like this, there’s really no point in even discussing what they spout.

But if we must, I think where I, as an anarchist, depart from some of the analyses above is in feeling that the 1950s was indeed a time of vast cultural ferment AND repression AND class mobility AND skepticism about mass culture — read the Beats or Jim Thompson or Ann Bannon or Lorraine Hansberry to see that. Then as now, there were many competing forces within US liberalism — listen to the concert recording of Phil Ochs singing “Love Me, I’m A Liberal”: after the line “I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts/ He sure gets me singing those songs!” the audience cheers at the namecheck, not yet clued in to the fact that Ochs is mocking them.

Matt, they weren’t banning gay marriage because they were imprisoning gays. They weren’t suspending habeas because they could blacklist you instead (and its a myth that habeas is gone.) The labor shortage Harold vaunts might have something to do with making half the population idle.

Medical care not so good: that’s one way to say it. Imagine life without statins, SSRIs, beta blockers, the Pap smear, transplants, effective antimalarials, and chemo drugs.

john, schizophrenia doesn’t let you dismiss aesthetic choices like that. Logicians are cranks, we all know that. It doesn’t make them stupid or not insightful. Kurt Goedel thought far more about the meaning of truth then any philosopher ever has. I do agree with you about Monk and Adorno’s likely opinion of him. In “The Fetish Character of Music” he lights into ad jingles with vengeance.

“Rich Puchalsky, I’m honestly not following you. Obviously, the successes of the 1950s and 1960s were the precondition both for further successes (such as feminism and gay rights) and for the Nixon reaction against those successes. What inference do you draw from this? That the successes are to be deplored?”

I’km reacting t a specific statement that “1953-1964 were the Golden Years in the US”. In fact, they were a time in which Golden Years for the white working and middle class were in part bought by racial repression. For instance, people who idealize the unions of that time are often pretty surprised to find out that they often functioned to keep economic competition by black workers out. This “Golden Age” falling apart at the same time as the Nixon reaction occurred and as civil rights were won is not coincidental; the Golden Age was maintained in part by giving white people a stable society in which they could look down on other people.

That doesn’t mean that successes are to be deplored, but it does mean that people who talk unreflectively of a Golden Age are ignoring the divisions in society that the Golden Age relied on. It can’t have been a Golden Age for everyone if civil rights killed it.

Disney had some pretty talented people working for him — Walt Kelley, for example.

Yesterday on his blog, Brad DeLong posted an extended quote from Waldo Jaquith’s On the impracticality of a cheeseburger, the main point of which is that a cheeseburger cannot exist even as a Platonic ideal without first presupposing an industrial infrastructure, and a set of economic relations very like our own. Marx would argue — did argue, I think — that we can’t either.

Apart from being a very juicy rebuttal to the cruder forms of libertarianism, Jaquith’s observation — and Marx’s, for that matter — provide a useful justification for being humble about our own possibilities. Once acknowledged, however, I don’t see anything in either observation that should prevent anyone from going on about his business. And that business, it still seems to me, is to provide one of many conduits through which modifications to both cheeseburgers and capitalism can emerge.

“it’s kind of an awesome dance along the line between clever and stupid.”

Holbo’s posts in a nutshell, and I mean that as a compliment. B+.

Though it is in a bit bad taste to talk down to Adorno, whatever his faults. “Of course, I grant that this much more admired and influential philosopher than myself has *some* value, just not *much*. Maybe if he liked comic books more, then he might be worthy of *fewer* snide remarks. He might even merit contemptuous detail discussions of his actual writings–like Zizek!–not just constant bitchy references to two short remarks about jazz and Donald Duck. I have a ball, Adorno, perhaps you’d like to bounce it. Us, on the other hand. We’re awesome, huh guys? Also, our times. Super awesome.”

@83
Sorry, you think it’s not ok to criticize Adorno, whatever his faults? Or it’s not ok to say that I disagree with him, unless I’m going to lay out the critique at monograph length? Or what?

Proper criticism of Adorno should be set to music (12 tone, of course). And in German.

I like the idea of setting criticism to 12 tone music, but no, really, it’s okay to criticize Adorno. I was objecting not to the point of the criticism (which I agree with) but the condescension. Specifically, the patronizing “good effort” pat on the head and the semi-complement about Minima Moralia that seemed to imply Adorno’s some sort of idiot savant. If you had left out those comments in your post and left everything else, I’d have had no objection.

I do think the manic obsession with the Donald Duck and jazz comments is cheap (mocking his poor application of his theoretical position doesn’t obviously refute the position) and silly and overly defensive (Who doesn’t acknowledge the value of many aspects of popular culture these days? Who does it need to be defended from?)

But this doesn’t amount to a “monograph-only” rule on criticism. It’s a “cite more than three words by the author” or a “focus on more than petty points” rule.

What Natilo Paennim said.

And while we’re talking about 50’s culture, it’s worth noting that 50’s Hollywood is pretty amazing (and fits NP’s characterization rather well): even leaving aside Hitchcock’s almost incredible output in this period, you have (at random) Kiss Me Deadly, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder, etc., etc. Whatever else you might think about these, they’re hardly banal. (And Watson, your list @21 has one French film, one Italian film, one film from the early 70’s, one second rate remake of a first rate Japanese movie from the 50’s, and one genuinely good Hollywood film from the 60’s. In fact, that pretty accurately sums up the state of film production in the 60’s.)

Wait a minute, The Magnificent Seven is a second rate remake? Please.

@90. Maybe that was too strong. Haven’t seen it in ages, but I remember being distinctly underwhelmed.

Rich P, I don’t think your analysis stacks up. Assuming for the sake of argument that the white working and middle classes benefited from the oppression of blacks, how large can that benefit have been?

Blacks are and were only about 10 per cent of the population, so even in a world with no racial disparities among workers, they would only have received about 7 per cent of total income (wage share is about 70 per cent). Suppose they actually got 3 per cent and that all of the surplus extracted from them went to white workers (I can’t see why this should be, but something of the kind seems to be implicit in your claim), we are only talking about 4 per cent of national income.

To reinforce this point, the US was exceptional in this period (among developed countries) as regards the race problem, but the Golden Age was just as marked, or more so, in other rich countries.

Not wishing to be snarky, but your argument seems to me to fail in much the same way as claims that low-income (mostly non-white) borrowers brought about the mortgage crisis. These groups simply don’t have enough economic weight to bring about the supposed effects.

Note well: Hayek and von Mises are Austro-Hungarian, not German; to a large extent they are arguing AGAINST the hierarchical uniformity (that they saw as) typical of Germany.

Well, Hitler was Austrian too. Hayek, von Mises, and also Schumpeter were big free marketers, but they were as firmly anti-democratic as the rest.

The left and right extremist parties got about 5% of the national vote at the highest point (probably 1936). In Germany it was at least 52% in 1932. Austria wasn’t any better to my knowledge.

…Arendt—did any of them ever ask themselves why it was Germany that produced Naziism…

Oh dear.

js, forgive me for thinking we had planes and worldwide distribution of films in the 1960s. You are right about my chronology being slightly off. Still, this was the New Wave in science fiction, the era of the Spaghetti Western, and the reemergence of surrealist comics after Krazy Kat. Granted, this is also evident in the 1950s to some extent, but just try comparing to today’s cinema.

Antonio, the Austria of Hayek and Schumpter was the Austria of Freud, not Hitler. It does seem odd to call Hayek antidemocratic: limitations upon the mob power are not anti-democratic, but rather preserve liberty. We live in modern times, let us have modern freedom: to avoid being the subjects of politics. The idea that those who listen to country music and vote Republican read Adorno is laughable. Can you imagine anyone today reading “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” on the radio without being run out of town on a rail, unless the town was San Francisco? Yet Adorno just did that in 1950’s Germany.

The Austria of Hitler was also the Austria of Freud.

@102:

Well of course there were planes and what not, but the quoted bit in Holbo’s post was about American pop culture (hence also the reference to Adorno), so Godard and Spaghetti Westerns seem beside the point. Also, don’t know much about this, but wasn’t “the New Wave in science fiction” a British literary movement?

In any case, my point was hardly to deny the cultural innovation of the 60’s (whether in the US or elsewhere), but rather to point to some cultural production from 50’s America that doesn’t easily fit into several myths/narratives about the 50’s.

Hayek and Von Mises always firmly favored -property and economic- liberalism over democracy. And people who support them always have to explain how their version is true democracy, and that actual democracy with political participation, etc., is false democracy.

That’s not my argument; my argument is that “a majority of us are in favor of beating up the filthy fitb’s and taking their stuff” means that beating up the fitbs and taking their stuff is both democratic and a bad idea.

my argument is that “a majority of us are in favor of beating up the filthy fitb’s and taking their stuff” means that beating up the fitbs and taking their stuff is both democratic and a bad idea.

Bad, no matter who the fits are? Well done, Uncle Tom.

@110
Another possibility is that those institutions had already incorporated themselves into the (as we would now call it, neoliberal) Establishment, and weren’t serving the purpose people thought they ought to be serving, which may actually be the view of those closest to the institutions in question–as opposed to middle-class academics who observed them at a distance. Arguably, this was already then the case w/r/t the unions.

Sam: So when PL was beating up ROAR in Boston, you think PL was really working against the working class by refusing to accept their racism?

Js, Asimov covers mostly US authors in his New Wave anthology. As I learned SF through the works of Dr. Asimov, I though of it as mainly US. Still, the late 60s and early 70’s had dramatic cultural change compared to the 1960’s.

Henri, that’s an argument that defies belief. Our lives should not be the subjects of politics: this is the essence of modern freedom. Remember the Athenian General whom was condemned to death, then pardoned and given honors because of the capricious nature of the Assembly? And yes, it is a bad thing to regard a group of individuals worthy of being punished because of who they are, not what they did. Or maybe we should abandon law and have the people vote directly who to string up.

They were happy during this Golden Age because they had a social system in which even white people in poverty could look down on other people; the Golden Age ended for them when civil equality began.

As a product of an extended family of white-flight Irish- and Italian-Americans who, over several decades, made the great trek from city to suburbs, and from FDR Democrats to Reagan Republicans, I think Rich is spot-on here.

“And you knew where you were then,” sang Archie & Edith in the opening credits to “All in the Family.” You knew your place in the pecking order, and those people knew theirs. Those were the days!

SamChevre: “My view is that the answer is institutional, not economic; as part of the suppression of anti-black racism, the institutions through which the white working class was able to act collectively (local schools, trades unions, community institutions of all sorts) were intentionally either destroyed or made useless.”

If one assumes (for one example) that the elites trashed unions because they were anti-racist, that’d make sense. If one assumes that the elites trashed unions precisely because they were a mechanism for working class people (of whatever race) to act collectively, then your statement is – well, ridiculous.

And I know which assumption I’ll make.

It wasn’t the respect for Germany that was wrong, but the failure to recalibrate after WWII.

OK, but (i) I don’t know how recalibration could have been possible given how deep the lionization of German-language culture ran (did it even really happen in France?), and (ii) to the extent respect for Germany meant trashing everything else, I’ll go out on a limb and say it was wrong.

SamChevre: “My view is that the answer is institutional, not economic; as part of the suppression of anti-black racism, the institutions through which the white working class was able to act collectively (local schools, trades unions, community institutions of all sorts) were intentionally either destroyed or made useless.”

While what SamChevre writes above is total nonsense, it supports what I’m saying that he believes it. Even now, people like him believe that schools, unions, and community institutions were purposefully destroyed by liberals who wanted to suppress anti-black racism, and that that’s why there is no longer a Golden Age for the white working class.

It’s not like this is some forgotten historical issue. It still has salience in current U.S. politics. And economists tend to invert what I see as cause and effect; they tend to see the racism as following on from economic changes that dispossessed the white working class, while I see a good part of the white working class throwing in with oligarchs who promise to bring some of that Golden Age racism back.

He wrote that “as part of the suppression of anti-black racism, the institutions through which the white working class was able to act collectively […] were intentionally either destroyed or made useless.” That seems fairly clear; note that the supposed destruction is intentional, not incidental. He thinks that liberals looked at labor unions, schools, etc. and said something like “These community institutions are all racist, so we’ll have to destroy them.”

John Emerson:

So Germanophobia is to be justified by “democratic” American nativism?

Well, I could be wrong about my claims, but I don’t think that I’m saying “Essentially you are saying that any progress in equality in one part of the system can only be achieved by greater oppression elsewhere and that (absent a revolution) we might as well give up.” I’m saying that white people got both economic and psychological benefits from racism, and that that’s why they think that era was so great. Since these benefits were unjust, I’m not saying that everything balances out and that greater freedom for black people led to more oppression for white people and it was all a wash. The advances really were advances. The greater oppression for white people afterwards was to a large extent self-chosen; white people chose to ally themselves to a political movement, the Republican Party, that promised them racism along with economic oppression. They didn’t have to chose to ally themselves in this way.

“In economic terms, they were objectively much better off than they (or people in the same class position) had ever been before and better off than the vast majority of people who had ever lived. ” People don’t make these kinds of comparisons in general; this is the same kind of reasoning that leads some right-wingers to say that since poor people have refrigerators and cell phones now, they aren’t really poor. Positionally, white people then were always comfortably one step up.

And again I could be wrong, but I still disagree with your assertion about the timing. Truman desegregated the military, yes, but people accept the military as a sphere in which the usual social rules don’t apply (in various directions). Yes, Brown vs. Board of Ed had been won, but it hadn’t started to really take effect until the end of this supposed era.

I believe that the existence of dispossessed is a characteristic of the economic system, and therefore if you must frame it in racial terms, then indeed, ‘greater freedom for black people leads to more oppression for white people’. What I can’t figure out is why the racial composition of the dispossessed is such a burning issue. Deal with the simple fact that there are dispossessed among us; who cares what they look like.

“I do think Adorno’s problems, as an observer of American culture, go beyond a few stray sentences about Donald Duck and rather more comments about jazz. I don’t think it’s a petty point that when Adorno doesn’t like some pop culture something, he declares it to be ‘industrially organized’ and that’s that. And the theory of the culture industry flows from that.”

Fair enough, I’d agree these stray sentences reflect a deeper problem. (Though the “petty points” I had in mind were Adorno’s petty jabs at pop culture, not your points. My sense is that those sentences are meant as cheap shots, so aren’t worth responding to and don’t really help criticism find the heart of the problem. Focusing on Adorno’s petty points is not itself petty; it’s just not that productive.)

“So it’s not just that the theory is badly applied to Donald Duck or whatever. It’s just a bad theory, allegedly sociological and culturally analytic but really an intensely personal projection.”

I agree here to a point. I think there are deep problems with his view, but I think it may be a matter of drawing conclusions and applications that are much stronger than is justified by a largely sound aesthetic theory. So, I’m not willing to too quickly declare it a “bad theory.”

I have a sense that Adorno’s critics and defenders often share a similar tendency to too quickly draw too strong evaluations about Adorno that do not admit of degree–in this way mirroring the mistake of many of his more disciplish defenders and mirroring Adorno’s own flawed rhetorical style. In the face of Adorno’s often poorly nuanced pronouncements, I think we should be more nuanced in our criticisms as well as our defenses.

I’m reminded of a conference paper critiquing a small inconsistency in Adorno’s “On the Fetish Character in Music,” holding Adorno to what I found a modest reading of his claims (at least as modest as possible while preserving their non-triviality). In the after-discussion, Jay Bernstein took the presenter to task for ignoring Adorno’s “style” by treating intentional exaggeration as commitment. So, Adorno is always either making strong, sweeping claims and so he’s indefensible. Or he’s making no claims at all in the guise of rhetorical strategy, so there’s nothing to defend. It’s too convenient for disciples and detractors alike.

The Austria of Von Mises was the Austria of Dollfuss.

By the way, I have to wonder what Adorno thought of the German popular culture of the 1950’s. When the alternative was bland, homogenous, industrially organized and produced Schlager music and Heimatfilms, it’s no wonder that younger West Germans started picking up American popular culture instead.

@133:

We’re agreed that Arendt was somewhat out of here “depth” there and misapplied her own concepts/intentions to the case/context. But, no, she wasn’t entranced by Southern claims to a unique “organic” society, or its “aristocratic” pretensions (and hierarchy), nor to the claims of local particularisms over “universal” norms. Nor did she think that blacks were or ought to be second-class citizens and accept a position of civic and political inferiority as their lot without objection or resistance. She was objecting to the resort to judicial fiat and its coercive enforcement over against resolving the issue through public-political processes to establish a lasting legitimate consensus. (It is one of the weaknesses of her thought that she defines political speech/action in opposition to violence, and thus rejects and evades the matter of the sovereign power of the state, which she rightly recognized as having a violent, coercive core, in favor of public communicative processes of generating power as legitimate consensus in the public sphere,- which, of course, doesn’t exist without sovereign states). That doesn’t imply, however, that children shouldn’t be protected from adult conflicts, rather than not be forced into them. And it’s really hard to say that Arendt’s points were entirely wrong, given the inadequacies of the policy of forced busing, the generation and persistence of political resentments and the fact that de facto educational segregation is still widespread and entrenched.

Arendt was just being “difficult”, reading things against the grain, which is the point of her work. It seems that you just projected your own liberal moralistic prejudices onto her without grasping the point of her political “amoralism”. Which is what happens if you read such foreigners literally in plain American and fall for the snares of their heavy irony and double game. She did respond to the criticisms of, e.g., Ralph Ellison, but, while decorously acknowledging his points, if one read her carefully, she didn’t retract her own. Though the controversy over “Arkansas” was nothing compared to the libelous abuse she endured over “Eichmann”, (which work IMHO actually holds up quite well in many of its controversial points).

Both before and after the Civil War the Southern elite complained about force being used against them even when it wasn’t, and used force against others whenever they felt it was necessary. Same with States Rights, as far as that goes, or strict constructionism.

‘ Or would he still not be served at Woolworth’s?’

To be fair, neither black NOR white people are served at Woolworth’s any more.

Henri, anti-labor and anti-dispossessed measures have been sold all along, south and north. by presenting the dispossessed as racially Other (the legendary welfare queen). One of the reasons the American welfare state is weaker than a European welfare state is that it had to be fine-tuned to get past racists in Congress (by excluding disproportionately black domestics and agricultural workers from many of its benefits.) In the South white supremacy went along with suppression of labor unions and abuse of poor whites; as long as the poor whites voted for Democrats for racial reasons, the Democrats they voted for could fight unions to their heart’s content.

You’re right, though, when the horrible racist White Working Class was abandoned the nice Black Working Class and Hispanic Working Class went down with them. Both groups being especially concentrated in the lower middle class and below. I’ve been saying for awhile that all the MLK Days and MLK Avenues and Cesar Chavez this and that and Black and Hispanic Studies Departments put together don’t do their respective beneficiary groups half as much good as a dollar raise of the minimum wage or a 1% reduction in unemployment would do.

I will note, because it was a rather important component of my point, that I specified “trade unions” in comment 111 for a reason; I wasn’t talking about industrial union.

Is there any reason to think that the white [male] working is the main constituency for racist policies?

Sure. This way black, hispanic and female 1%ers don’t have to examine their consciences over their banker and law firm bonuses.

Bianca: I said no such thing, as I’m sure you know. I just have asked why American intellectuals of 1945-1960 (the New York Intellectuals, as they called themselves, and the so-called “consensus theorists” like Hofstadter and Bell) were so servile before the wisdom of the Germans. Cultural and intellectual America has deferred to Europe and Germany from the start, but shouldn’t WWII have taken some of the bloom off (the same way that WWI turned a lot of colonial leaders from Westernizers to nationalists)? America has its own perfectly fine political tradition and philosophical tradition, but in the universities the failed German thinkers overwhelmed them, and there are now, for example, almost no pragmatists teaching in American universities.

There seemed to be no acknowledgement that it was the US and not Germany that came out of WWII looking morally superior to Genghis Khan. Instead we had a torrent of culture criticism about the trashiness of America, much of it traceable to Adorno et al, and in the university the imposition of a variety of European ideologies (Strauss, Arendt, logical positivism, psychoanalysis, etc.)

Strauss declared himself to be a fascist around 1932 and would have kept in touch with his Nazi friends if they had been willing to keep in touch with him. There’s no record of a change of heart. Why was he received so warmly?

“I just have asked why American intellectuals of 1945-1960 (the New York Intellectuals, as they called themselves, and the so-called “consensus theorists” like Hofstadter and Bell) were so servile before the wisdom of the Germans.”

Physics envy? Albert Einstein?

Not sure that I understand your reply. To unpack mine a bit more, the 1945-1960 era was also the dawn-of-nuclear-weapons era, and Einstein was and is highly admired as a German refugee. Maybe some of that prestige rubbed off on other German refugees, even though they obviously have nothing to do with physics. People who write about politics and philosophy have wanted to be more “scientific” for a while, just like economists have.

Bianca: Germanophobia does not necessarily involve taking all German books out of the libraries and burning them. Germanophobia was in fact someone else’s word, maybe yours, and I used it in my own response. I reserve the right to define that very loose word as I wish. For me it just means realizing that after the Franco-Prussian War, WWI, and WWII maybe German and European culture aren’t worthy of adulation.

“All other issues”? I can’t talk about every issue there is all at once. I said something about culture criticism there. Adorno was very popular in that crowd, for example with Hofstadter.

The US has a traditional inferiority complex visivis Europe and Germany. It seems to me that in 1945 it was reasonable to ask “How did Mozart and Kant and Hegel and Brahms and Wagner and Goethe and Schiller come to this? What lesson should we take from this” And a lot of Germans, eventually if not immediately, did ask these questions. (Adorno’s treatment of these questions strikes me as self-serving.) But the American response was quite different and Strauss, Arendt, and Adorno at least seemed to think that they were keeping real culture alive in a desert .

Rich: None of the people I named were in the least scientific, and most (except the logical positivists) were pretty vigorously non-scientific.

AC: I was indeed surprised that you began using the word “Germanophobia.” I’m curious about what you’re trying to say, which doesn’t seem entirely clear (which is, of course, my personal, humble opinion).

I suppose it’s my fault for bringing all Europe into it, but you are guessing wildly as to my reasons. I was being somewhat ironic, but I don’t think I was unclear at all. It seemed that you were contrasting German culture to other European cultures, and looking for a villain who started it all, or who culminated what the original villain(s) started. Which it now seems is not the case, rather that you are contrasting naive American “pragmatism” with all Western culture that has ever been (though why you feel comfortable claiming it all for Germany I still don’t quite understand).

the American response was quite different

Not according to Bell, I think, and some other historians.

I think there are probably perfectly good reasons why deference to European scholars, including even German scholars, didn’t end in 1945. As has been hinted above, the safe assumption that they would be anti-communist is probably among them.

AC: I can’t take responsibility for the expansion of the range of subject matter this time. I don’t have time for this.

Antonio, anti-intellectualist populism looks a lot like Naziism. Hitler was for burning books, not reading them! The German elite, even the conservative elite was anti-Hitler. Hitler’s support was the petite bourgeoise and the unemployed workers.

Actually, petty bourgeois Americans were mostly Republicans.

John Emerson:

Positivism “killed” pragmatism, not German “metaphysics”, and the former was not a “German” matter, aside from a few Anglophile Austrians, – (and one shouldn’t confuse Germans with Austrians). On the other hand, the one original American philosophical genius, C.S. Peirce, though a Boston Brahmin, was heavily influenced by German philosophy, early on by Kant and later on adhering to Schelling. And part of the project of Dewey and Mead was to naturalize the Hegelianism of their teacher Royce.

For the rest, Strauss is a minor figure, influential only with a cult of rightist American academics. Many of the others you mention were anti-fascist exiles, often of at least partly Jewish “origins”. It’s as rich to blame them for Hitler as it is absurd to reduce German cultural, intellectual and scientific traditions to Nazism. One of Adorno’s main accomplishments during his American exile was to collaborate with American sociologists on a study of the “authoritarian personality”, using anti-Japanese racism in CA as the substitute case.

You’re just trash-talking and espousing ethno-centric essentialism in the most, er, unenlightened way. Yes, those German Mandarins were stuffed to the gills with Kultur like prized poultry. But it’s up to you to dine out on them as you please, rather than indulging in a food fight. But maybe you’re just entrapped in that “democratic” individualism that resents all status-hierarchies, which just renders it all the more susceptible to status-competition and the de facto submission to obscured “native” hierarchies.

@167:

Umm…You’ve heard of Father Coughlin, eh?

“If fascism comes to America, it will be in the guise of anti-fascism”- attributed to Huey Long. Blame that on those You’re-a-poens.

I do blame Hitler on the Europeans, specifically the Germans. Sorry to be so ethnocentric, nativist, and provincial.

Shouldn’t Germans have been a bit humbled? I know that many post-war Germans were.

jch: So concerns about theory, proof, truth, -(“one can be truthful, even if there is no truth”),- and morality are just projections of your own conventional liberal “equipment” onto the reading/understanding of Arendt.

I’d be more ready to put the blame on reading ability than “projection.” My memory is that the large parts of Arendt’s books that discuss specific events have a large dollop of unmistakeably moralizing language, in straightforward declarative sentences. With regard to such simple sentences “projection” might be a fairly serious charge.

I did know AC was John Emerson, but I only just remembered that what Hofstadter had to say about his beloved La Follette, again in my memory, was kind of positive. So it’s entirely possible that it’s my memory or the reading skills of my younger self that are at fault. No time to check either right now.

173: Hitler. Too easy.

But it’s a continuum of awful to throw out. Germany because Hitler, Russia because Stalin, China because Mao…and on down the line of cultures you can toss because of this or that miserable product. What culture is the culture just inside the sphere of respectability?

One of the reasons that U.S. militarism persists and still retains so much popular support, is that WW2 was the “Good War”, which “proved” our heroic virtue as a nation, and Americans have little sense of what it is like to be in the midst of the devastation of war, in terms of recent generational experience.

It’s America’s turn to be Germany now. The Germans have become much nicer once they stopped being the center of civilization, but it isn’t doing us any good.