Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id757152963
I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly. That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.
✏️ This whole thing about stuff happening slowly and then all at once.. Is it just a catchy way of saying something that allows for quick resonance (like the whole thing of reversing a statement to make it sound profound.. did the cat catch the mouse, orrrr, did the mouse actually catch the cat?) If it is true though, there does seem to be a trend of it in history. As will be outlined below, but also that early page from Blood in the Machine that talks about UK in 1890 and they were quickly getting revolutionary, and then suddenly boom, clamp down. Also, us here, things are fine, then suddenly, a generation of clamp down. Also related, the quote about how crises are the best times to enact major change. Also also related, the quote by timothy snyder about how leaders (authoriatrians) await/plan for extreme crises/attacks to enact their big changes and crazy plans. #followup 🔗 View Highlight
id757154523
In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.
id757154524
In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement. And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.
id757154525
1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….” And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.
id757154732
something fans them into flame. In the 1760s it was the Stamp Act, which said that men in Great Britain had the right to rule over men in the American colonies. In the 1850s it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave the elite enslavers the power to rule the United States. And in 1929 it was the Great Crash, which proved that the businessmen had no idea what they were doing and had no plan for getting the country out of the Great Depression.
✏️ Boiling points in all those earlier examples 🔗 View Highlight
id757155735
Lenin put it well in 1917: “Sometimes decades happen in weeks.”
👓 quote 🔗 View Highlight
id757155734
French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin once said: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”