Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?

https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/has-america-crossed-the-asshole-threshold

by JumpCrisscross • 14 days ago

50 29 14 days ago

thegrimhistorian.substack.com

rafterydj• 14 days ago

is the author of this post in thread? i do not like the AI voice it reads like.

Cpoll2• 14 days ago

I didn't notice any obvious markers, weird prose, or meandering in this one.

jbotz• 14 days ago

It's rather full of "it's not X, it's Y" and expository paragraph followed by short sentence counter-point, and "read that again".

But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.

ekelsen5• 14 days ago

It's clearly written by AI. I find it interesting that some people recognize it immediately and others do not. I don't know what to make of it.

elzbardico• 14 days ago

That would be disappointing, as the author is a fairly known writer.

rayiner2• 14 days ago

It's remarkable that this article talks about Tammany Hall, Plato, and MAGA, without mentioning the throughline among them: immigration. Tammany Hall’s peak century coincided with mass immigration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall.

As Wikipedia explains: "In the 1840s, over 130,000 Irish immigrants arrived in New York City to escape the Great Famine, arriving in poverty and joining scores of thousands of their fellow countrymen who had arrived over the prior decades. By 1855, 34 percent of the city's voter population was composed of Irish immigrants. By providing these new arrivals with patronage employment, job referrals, legal aid, food, shelter, employment insurance, and other extralegal services, including citizenship and naturalization services, Tammany secured the lifelong support of the large and growing Irish population, which would form the majority of its electoral base for the next century. In exchange for these services, the Tammany political machine harvested Irish immigrant votes."

The article also quotes Plato, who predicted Tammany Hall 2,400 years earlier. Plato saw good government as a precarious and fragile thing that could be achieved only through careful cultivation of the polity's "constitution"--not just a legal document, but the political "way of life." As a result, Plato's ideal city had strong borders and was insulated from both trade and immigration: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/983154/1/EXO....

"In most states of course, such confusion is a way of life with which people learned to cope by various compromises, as was the case when immigrants are allowed into a country (PS, 293d). But such compromises were neither necessary nor desirable for Plato, since any policy of unrestricted immigration would destroy his political constitution (PL, 736c; 950a). Aristotle agreed that immigration was a dangerous thing because it pitted newcomers against those already established, thus creating tensions and frictions between them."

Plato's Republic describes a society's descent into anarchy as involving the erasure of distinctions between citizens and foreigners: "the metic" (legal permanent resident) "becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner."

The author sets up an astute point linking Tammany Hall, Plato, and MAGA republicans, but somehow whiffs the conclusion. The U.S. didn’t defeat Tammany Hall through unspecified “fighting back”—it did so through assimilation and homogenization. The U.S. enacted restrictive immigration law in 1921. That, coupled with a population boom, dropped the foreign born population from 15% to under 5% and largely erased the separate identity of Ellis Island immigrants. That neutering of ethnic attachments made it impossible to sustain political machines that were built on ethnic solidarity.

PearlRiver• 14 days ago

Tammany Hall did not happen because they were immigrants it happened because someone thought it was a good idea to have people who could not even write their own name vote. Democracy hinges on a well educated populace who actually gives a shit- which as we all know has not and never will happen.

The worst form of government- except for all the others so far tried.

rayiner2• 14 days ago

But they couldn’t read because they were poor immigrants to a country that at the time led the world in literacy. The literacy rate in New England for adult men was 90% in 1776. It’s not a surprise that New England probably remains the best governed part of the country.

And there are instances of democracy working well. Alexis de Tocqueville described a healthy democracy existing in the midwest in 1831. Tammany Hall was particularly bad and corrupt even by the standards of the time.

Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?

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