Speaker For The Diodes - October 29th, 2010

05:26 am - QotD

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana (b. 1863-12-16, d. 1952-09-26)

I was thinking of the Santayana quote yesterday, when talking about the Tea Party. It occurs to me that those whose neighbours cannot remember the past may be comdemned to have it repeated upon them, if too few bother to go and vote against the wackaloons their Beck-addled fellow citizens are voting for (or if there are too few reasonable people left).

I expected the US to forget recent lessons -- we always do -- but I've been hoping it'd take us more than a mere two years to do so. And then, after I'd dropped that quotation into its place in the queue, I saw this:

"Looking at [historical ecomomic] numbers, it would be reasonable to infer that when the Tea Partyers say that they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since. Reasonable, but wrong. As the right sees it, America's woes are traceable to the New Deal order that Franklin Roosevelt, working in the shadow of the even more sinister Woodrow Wilson, imposed on an unsuspecting people.

"In fact, the New Deal order produced the only three decades in American history -- the '50s, '60s and '70s -- when economic security and opportunity were widely shared."

-- Harold Meyerson, 2010-10-27

(Others have noted that at least some of the Tea Partyers appear, based on their speeches, to want to take the nation clear back to the 1830s, or a rather blinkered version of the 1830s in which only the wealthy, male, and white[*] are visible and nobody ever gets sick.)

[*] Interestingly, the concept of who gets counted as "white enough" varies considerably across time and space. Even looking only at the US, several groups now considered unambiguously white and afforded all the social privilege relevant to that status, were the dirty, untrustworthy immigrant menace that businesses were free to discriminate against in the periods some of these folks think they want to emulate. Which brings us right back to the "those who cannot remember the past" problem again.