Posted by youcould 10/26/2024
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: you guys have done a fantastic job and this thread is so much better than it could have been. Thanks!
Here's my own take: the recent history of the West in general, and the US more particularly, has been a conflict between two competing worldviews – one relatively "traditional", the other calling itself "progressive". And go back to the 1960s, the competition between the two worldviews seemed relatively coherent – the "traditionalists" controlled most of the power structures in society, the "progressives" were (by and large) an anti-authoritarian rebellion against those structures. But, 50-60 years later, now the "progressives" (and their heirs) have come to dominate large sections of those same power structures, and they've swapped their prior (relatively consistent) anti-authoritarianism for an inconsistent mixture of authoritarianism about some things and anti-authoritarianism about others.
You can see the same thing in other Western countries – even if not to quite the same degree – who have rather different ethnic histories. That's part of why I'm sceptical that appeals to the history of different Anglo subethnicities really works as an explanation.
I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article, but at least it's an explanation for the weirdness.
California is just "California", and an "Anglo-Saxon" tradition or lens just doesn't track back west - be it California, Texas, Washington, etc.
Just think about it - Kearny Street is named after a racist Irish immigrant. Levi and Haas were the most prominent businessmen in that era and were German Jews. Gold was found in Sutter Fort - a hacienda owned by a Swiss German. Much of the settlement in Central California was farmers from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Asia, Armenia, etc. Chinatowns and Japantowns dotted much of California, and Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese fishermen were overrepresented.
I think it's difficult to dispute that the principal political and social structures of the US, including California, are primarily derivative of the Anglo-Saxon model and its various facets, both in its core structures (e.g. how its democratic institutions function, economic life is organized, etc) but also in its relationship with oppositional groups (e.g. the Irish experience that continued to unfold in North America, and which also shaped how new groups assimilated into oppositional positions). This is most obvious in the context of our legal systems, but you can see it in both national and local political and social structures. Germans, Jews, Native Americans (to the extent they chose to engage), and everybody else assimilated into this system. They shaped it, to be sure, but the essential outlines remain distinctly identifiable as derivative of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the British Isles going back to before William the Conquerer (most periods of which also involved clashes of culture and synthesis of foreign and domestic!). Could you persuasively argue that California politics is more like Mexican politics than it is the politics of other so-called Anglo-Saxon systems like the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, or even South Africa? Also, don't forget that in most ways Californian politics is indistinguishable from that of Washington and Oregon, neither of which have strong Spanish or Mexican legacies that have persisted into the present day.
That said, I think the author overstates the explanatory power of Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage. It's impossible to understand contemporary American politics without understanding the contribution of mid 20th century French deconstructionists, or early 20th century Jewish intellectual immigrants, on both the left and right. Or even that of the American experience--when it comes to the prevalence of endemic societal violence, for example, North and South America altogether stand out distinctly from the rest of the world, for a multitude of reasons rooted in shared historical phenomena (e.g. slavery, frontier ethos, etc), few of which relate back in a distinctive, useful way to the particular history of the British Isles. Likewise, many countries, including Mexico, also saw similar French and Eastern European Jewish influences. And at this point there's an argument to made that it's more productive to set a new fixed point rooted in 19th and 20th century Western modernity, and US cultural hegemony that filters disparate influences as they take hold elsewhere in the world.
Calling Ireland in particular “Anglo-Saxon” instead of “Anglo-Celtic” is especially jarring to my ears.
Canada has Quebec, and also Francophone minorities in other provinces.
South Africa was heavily influenced by the Dutch/Afrikaners. And since the end of British rule, the South African system has discarded a lot of its British heritage-much of that was driven by its Afrikaner-dominated apartheid era ruling party.
I think in terms of law, culture, politics, governance, there has been a lot of divergent evolution between the US and most of the rest of the Anglosphere, which calling it “Anglo-Saxon” ignores. “Anglo-American” may be the better term.
> North and South America altogether stand out distinctly from the rest of the world, for a multitude of reasons rooted in shared historical phenomena (e.g. slavery, frontier ethos, etc),
Slavery has had a long history in most parts of the world. Millions of African slaves were also sent to the Middle East, and there was also a lot of intra-African slavery and slave trading. Slavery also used to be a very big thing in Europe, but it largely disappeared in the Middle Ages (primarily, it appears, for economic reasons as opposed to moral ones)
Other parts of the world have a similar “frontier ethos” to the Americas, for example Australia, Siberia, white South Africans
Both are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences.
In Scotland, the Celtic ancestry is stronger among Highlanders, the Anglo-Saxon stronger among Lowlanders – but neither are purely descended from one as opposed to the other.
The English conquered Ireland in the 12th century, which was followed by successive waves of Anglo immigration down the centuries. Many of the earlier waves of Anglo settlers ended up assimilating into a Celtic identity (summarised by the famous quip that they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves"), some of the more recent waves less so (which is one of the causes of the still only partially resolved conflict in Northern Ireland).
> You could make the argument for calling them Anglo-Celtic now but not so much at the time of the settlement of the US.
I find it interesting (as an Australian) that in Australia the term "Anglo-Celtic" is preferred much more than in the US. I think that's because, while both countries have been significantly influenced by Irish Catholics, proportionately the influence was more significant in Australia's case.
Even if Anglo-Saxons are now a minority, as a founding population they can exert disproportionate influence. New immigrants want to fit in to their new home, so they adopt majority views, thereby reinforcing those majority views for subsequent immigrant waves.
They were never a majority in California.
Take a look at census data as well as reading basic California history.
The largest ethnic groups in California have always been Hispanics and Germans.
Albion's Seed is a good book, but Fischer's analysis was limited to Appalachia, New England, the Delaware Valley, and Virginia. He did mean for it try to be a generalized explanation for the entire US.
Furthermore, if you look at the history of legislation in the West and Midwest, it's also fairly distinct in comparison to the East Coast.
Abolitionism, trade unions, Humboldtian ideal, women's suffrage, etc all had extremely strong support across much of the West and Midwest, and this itself was due to post-1849 immigration from Central Europe following the failed revolutions of 1849.
Just think about it in general - almost everything that you think is "American" is actually German. Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, etc.
Post 2015 Europe would like to have a word with that.
Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo'd out of some Libertarian ideal (let alone a Scottish one). It's poo-poo'd because it's seen as an ineffective fix for addiction. This is largely true, but the activists forgot that a lack of drug enforcement can ruin city centers.
Reform should start in our incarceration system not in crime enforcement but I digress.
Those bring down a lot of said drug problem... Externally.
The west's approach is kind of the opposite: actively go after the sources of drugs, and to leave the users relatively alone. On a moral level this is appealing because the users are victims. However on a practical level it doesn't seem to work as well because it's swimming against the economic current.
We have slowly realized this doesn't really work.
Instead we are moving towards harm reduction but that's easier said than done and I think we will see a new approach towards drug selling.
America is unable to figure out its systematic prejudices, therefore cannot adopt “tough on crime” policies (like Singapore’s)
Do you really think Singapore doesn’t have systemic prejudices?
America's always are.
Singapore is less violent only because the minority communities aren’t able to actually fight back, not because they don’t get smacked down. By the police.
Conflict is inevitable when there is both misaligned incentives and either hope of victory, or such a lack of hope that there is nothing left to lose.
Singapore is a good example of having-enough-to-lose-it’s-not-worth-fighting, and no-hope-of-success-in-getting-anything-else. Not an example of no-smackdowns-occurring.
Much of the black/police and black/black violence in the US is caused by many of the communities being in the nothing left to lose state. At least for many of its members. And having enough tools at their disposal to cause violence, with a weak enough set of policing to not actually subjugate the communities entirely.
Singapore is a small island with a quite authoritarian (defacto) dictatorship (I still love you Singapore, despite this! But you know it’s true.) with extremely heavy arms controls. Seriously, if you read the gun laws and saw how heavy enforcement was, you’d understand.
Literally the best ‘bad’ folks can muster, even with concerted effort, is the occasional starter pistol, modified air soft gun, or some knives. The police have machine guns.
In the case of drug enforcement, the idea was to decriminalize and destigmatize drugs so that persons addicted to them could seek treatment and rehabilitation. Problem is, that also requires public money be spent on rehabilitation programs. It's cheaper for the state to just get people high and let them die.
Same thing with "defund the police", which had an implicit "and use the money to fund mental health programs" at the end of it, along with prescriptions to fund deescalation training for whatever cops we still needed. All the Twitter activists heard this, they chanted "defund the police" as if everyone else had too, but that memo didn't reach the desk of any of the mayors who actually tried these programs. To make matters worse, a lot of city police departments took this literally, deliberately, to discredit anti-police activism. So the cops effectively punished the city for speaking out against them.
The underlying problem is that communicating these problems in a way that's succinct enough to resist malicious interpretation, without it coming off as a way to dodge the blame for your own problems, is very difficult. You are not entitled to make others think or speak the way you do. Concepts you invent will be reinterpreted however people like unless you drown them in so much French that only your own apparatchiks can understand them[0]. In other words, these are shibboleths - terms that exist solely for an in-group to identify themselves to one another.
Here's the thing: this is great for MEGO[1] and terrible activism. When Louis Rossmann wants to point out how companies are retroactively changing the deal, he doesn't say it's wrong to do that, he says the CEOs have a "rapist mentality". When Cory Doctorow wants to talk about how Internet platforms get worse and worse, he talks about "enshittification[2]". These coinages work because they leverage the listener's existing understanding of those concepts. Semantic drift works to their advantage: someone misusing "enshittification" to refer to, say, inflation, rather than the gradual demise of Internet platforms, is continuing the analogy.
[0] More generally, habitual insistence on the use of one's idiolect - especially one crafted to motte-and-bailey your unsavory opinions - is a sign of an abusive personality. Yes, that's a dig at RMS.
[1] "My Eyes Glaze Over", aka "disguising heinous shit behind boring language"
[2] Enshittification is a particularly funny one, because it's exactly the sort of fancy French word you'd expect, but with a nice Anglo-Saxon swear word in it.
This is just not true:
>> Subsidies for drug treatment are by far the fastest-growing major component of federal spending on drug abuse. Advanced by many policy makers as the key to curbing drug use, federal expenditures for drug treatment have risen by 341 percent since 1986 -- 20 percent faster than the total drug budget, 30 percent faster than spending for drug law enforcement and 700 percent faster than overall federal spending. This year, the federal government will spend more than $1.1 billion on treatment. (These figures exclude spending for drug treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Owing in part to the extraordinary success of drug testing and other drug prevention programs in the military, spending has grown much more slowly in the VA than the overall rate of government spending.) And Drug Czar Bob Martinez is calling for more spending on education and treatment
Like most things, you can't just throw money at it and expect it to magically get better. There are a ton of resources out there but there needs to be willingness on the participant. Since there's no stigma attached to public drug use and normalization of being an addict, there's even less pressure for people to get treatment so the money is pretty much wasted on every growing bureaucracy and the administrative class
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-case...
I take your point about the capacity never having built but the activists also have to admit that the “seeking” also never happened and we simply haven’t solved that problem (how do you solve addiction for someone who doesn’t want it solved? You can’t)
But we should, now, save our cities.
American Nations is a more recent book that describes more of the United States, though with less depth.
A third were born in California,
and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”.
And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures
The modern state of California was considered part of the Spanish empire for nearly 300 years. The Spanish colonial period had a profound effect on the cultural, religious, and economic development of the state.
The Spanish Empire shaped the foundations of land ownership, mineral rights, and water access in the region.
There are shelves of books on the subject - I'm not even in or from the Americas, I'm hardly the person to ask.
The point stands, it's a lousy essay that ignores some substantial American history, likely because it's not "USofA" history.
If you look at the Latinos and Asians who are politically involved in California, I would predict that they are far from typical, and they're much more likely to be assimilated into the state's progressive political traditions.
By the way, geography also explains the culture of the Scots-Irish. This area was the natural limit of Rome’s ability to settle because it was the beginning of open moors that were much harder to control by central authority, so they gave up and built Hadrian’s and Antonine’s walls. It makes sense that once the state finally became strong enough to assert a hold over these areas (shortly after the development of the printing press), they fled to Ireland and then America to continue to enjoy their anarchic lifestyle.
Methinks it might not be the most representative of California's political history.
California is just California, and trying to apply an "Anglo" lens is dumb and ahistorical.
It's true that Spanish influence isn't taken into account enough in this article, but the article is still pretty sound in the importance it puts on Puritan and Borderer (Scots-Irish) cultural influence, as these are the two foremost cultural forces at odds with one another to this day, not just in California, but across the United States. The Okies in this case would be Borderers.
And again, although we see other non-Anglo cultural forces, immigrants typically align and integrate more or less with either the Puritan or the Borderer ethos.
The book examines a variety of folkways, naming conventions, and lineages in the cultural regions throughout old England, discovers those same things present in regions throughout America, and then follows the continued expression of those folkways and lineages all the way up to the present day.
And although we can find similarities between Puritans or Borderers with other cultures around the world, we can't make a convincing case that, for example, the Japanese had a significant influence on American culture and politics, because again, the primary sources revealing the folkways examined in Albion's seed are quite distinct and can be accurately traced from old England, to American settlement, and again up to the present day. Puritan architecture, food, naming conventions, and ancestry is quite distinct and well-understood, and we see evidence of those things throughout the United states, whereas there's not much Japanese architecture, food, place-names, or influential dynasties here in America.
Anyway, Albion's Seed is a very good book that I highly recommend reading.
Okies were not uniformly Scotch Irish - it was a generic term for internal migrants from North Texas and Southern Oklahoma which was very ethnically diverse with German, Czech, Russian, and Southern settlers along with Native Americans and Hispanics.
Irish (eg. Kearny), German (eg. Haas, Levi, Sutter), Southern Italians, Russian, and Chinese settlers were much more prominent than Anglos during the frontier era along with the obviously large Hispanic population in a region that has been under Spanish rule longer than it has been under American rule.
There's a reason why bock bier (eg. Shiner Bock), dryland farming (a Russian German thing), frybread (from the Bureau of Indian Affairs era), Cowboy culture (a merger of older Hispanic Ranchero culture with southern settler culture), etc became a thing in Texas and Oklahoma
(and to your point about italians: I'm not sure but suspect the use of snubbing posts in round pens came via swamp italians. Also, don't forget the portuguese: not as prominent as on HI, but still pretty common, eg Devin Nunes)
During my 20+ years in the Bay Area I listened to a lot of Portuguese/Azorean radio, so much that it corrupted my accent. I was born in the Texas of Brazil but I sound a bit like the British equivalent now.
Absolutely (though it's specifically Azoreans)!
And to that point, stereotypes do not take into account the historic diversity that Central California has had.
Mexican, Okies, Portuguese/Azorean, Italian, German, Czech, Armenian, Chinese, Punjabi, Russian, and other settlers had an outsized influence on the development of Central California.
And this itself highlights how Albion's Seed does not generalize well outside the Eastern Seaboard (nor did Fischer intend for his work to be applied that way - he only concentrated on New England, Virginia, the lower Delaware Valley/Philly, and Appalachia, not on the rest of the US.
Morally though, how does one justify that dealing meth on the corner is OK but putting your banana peel in the trash bin is wrong? I think it comes down to the idea that some people are accountable and others aren't. If someone commits a major crime, obviously there must be something wrong with their brain. It's a medical problem. If they commit a minor crime though, they're just selfish and prioritizing their own convenience.
Anyways, that type of thinking is a lot more common with liberals than anyone else - which makes sense. If you’re against racism,sexism, etc. to the extreme you basically need to believe we’re all exactly the same, apart from external circumstance. At its extreme they’re the same type of people that don’t believe that men have an advantage in most sports, for instance.
I found it interesting in thinking about how much I attribute blame to individuals or their circumstances.
I doubt there is a place where politics are coherent. The author just got raised in some other variation of political insanity, and thinks it's normal.
The anti-puritan strain isn't necessarily Scots-Irish, either. It's common in anyone who's had to suffer under puritanism.
Hell, it was so notorious all the Dirty Harry movies were centered there (either that or NYC, which was similarly going crazy).
What’s the historical analysis I’m supposed to take with this, dang? This is classic conservative framing, all the way to throwing progressive in scare quotes. Nothing other than generic culture war fodder can be gleaned from this unless you already agree with these absurd premises…