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Wednesday, November 6, 2019

THE WHIG AUDIENCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

"...whether the citizens of the United States now have enough understanding of, or belief in, our government, to make it work effectively...Today, only lawyers--not students of history--know anything about British legal and constitutional precedents, and almost no one knows anything about the political history of ancient Greece and Rome.  Our fellow countrymen, I would suggest, do not know about this history of legislative inquiry as a check on executive power....Sanders,...Warren, still believe in this model of government, but how many voters do?...How many of them care that the Trump Administration is ignoring much of the bureaucracy....how many...have a real commitment to public education...And how many believe in interventionist foreign policy? Without the right training, few Americans can make sense of our complex government and our complex world. " DK

I agree with this. It really spells the end of the liberal democratic project since 1776, and of the Enlightenment before. It is really an indictment of the West.

But it can sound a little bit like Soviet propaganda, can't it.

Further, telling readers we triumphed over all our crises, (especially the Soviet debacle of WWII, which we lost to them in spades), and the Enlightened rational bourgeois merchant (Left) North beat the passionate emotional aristocratic (Imperialist Ancien Regime Right) South, is not fulfilling for the author, really, even if the audience for which it is written always buys it, and  even if one believes it oneself. 

But doesn't it, too, smack a little much of Soviet propaganda, (taking advantage, once again, as they did since the 30s, of America's racial divisions for tactical reasons,) pitting good North against bad South forever?

I write here for myself, for those who can follow it, and even, at times, for those who cannot. My stuff can sound a bit like Soviet propaganda. Putin says such things as Western liberalism has choked the West. 


It is not just propaganda, as Thomas L Friedman has noted re Trump. Some things are true even if Putin says them, and even if they are Soviet propaganda. The most effective propaganda, after all, is propaganda containing some truth. 

Sometimes the best propaganda, in a Whig world, is something completely true. It queers the Whig audience.

My view is that one is better off not writing whig interpretation propaganda because the audience cannot follow anything more complex, more accurate, more true, more messy, more ambiguous, more unprogressive, more repulsive, or more disappointin
g.


One is better off not writing left or right propaganda.


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