"Presentism"

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Learned a new word today — presentism — I'd had the concept in my head for a while but I didn't know that it was a named phenomenon.

Adam Gopnik wrote:: Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. Thomas Friedman is concerned.

Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?

Subject: Re: "Presentism" Fri Mar 17, 2017 8:31 am

Here's why presentism is an invalid concept when discussing the end of liberalism.

Education.

A whole generation of Bubbas have been raised with sub-standard schooling, and reinforced with non-fact-based television. The infrastructure upon which liberalism must build has crumbled, in the south, in the rural parts of this country, in the less affluent neighborhoods. We have a Third World nation living inside the USA, and suspicion, distrust, blame and racial hatred rules this nation. They have grown to 42% of the electorate, and they're mad enough to come to the polls more than liberals.

Even the disaster which will result from Trump won't wake these people up. Their entire world view is anti-liberal.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Quote :: Here's why presentism is an invalid concept when discussing the end of liberalism.

Except that's not what "presentism" is, nor how Gopnik employs it in this article.

Posts : 139 Join date : 2015-06-28

Rick Perlstein wrote:: The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump. Historians, of course, are not called upon to be seers. Our professional canons warn us against presentism — we are supposed to weigh the evidence of the past on its own terms — but at the same time, the questions we ask are conditioned by the present. That is, ultimately, what we are called upon to explain. Which poses a question: If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.

Subject: Re: "Presentism" Wed Apr 12, 2017 7:18 am

I dunno.

The author wants to make history about grand philosophies and overarching political trends.

It's more likely, I think, due to personalities.. Reagan -- who was not a traditional Conservative, BTW -- won because people liked his "ah shucks" personal manner. Trump -- who has no overarching political philosophy besides "greed is good" -- was elected because in an atmosphere of poisonous political gridlock he was the anti-politician.

I think it's as simple as that.

Posts : 4264 Join date : 2013-01-16

Every Day is Opposite Day

Subject: Re: "Presentism" Wed Apr 12, 2017 7:48 am

Fact check:

Dave Pell wrote:: In 2013, Assad launched a chemical attack. Obama did not answer with a direct military response. In 2017, Assad launched a chemical attack. Trump did what he always does.

In 2013 Obama asked Congress -- a deeply politicized Republican-controlled deny-Obama Congress -- for authorization to bomb Syria. They would not give it to him.

In 2017 Trump went ahead and ordered the missile strike, without Congressional authorization, reportedly because his daughter Ivanka was upset by pictures on TV of children killed in the gas attack. Trump, who had railed against Obama's use of Executive Orders (the only way he could get ANYTHING done with McConnell's Congress) has himself done every policy change so far by Executive Order. His one attempt to work with Congress on an actual bill (AHCA) went up in the flames of miserable failure.

Trump is president in name only. He is not the leader of the free world, he is not the leader of the country, he is not the leader of Congress, he's not even a leader in the White House. Steve Bannan and Jared Kushner are running the Presidency.

Trump, like Reagan and W before him, is just a sock puppet.

A sock puppet who likes to distract the media from the serious issues they need to focus on, instead throwing out ridiculous National Enquirer tweets at 3:00am knowing serious journalists will set their hair on fire trying to disprove them.

Subject: Re: "Presentism" Wed Apr 12, 2017 7:54 am

Meanwhile Congress remains divided, Republicans against Republicans, the Party of No, who found it so easy over the past eight years to vote no on everything rather than crafting any legislation that they are continuing on that pathway. Do not look for any consensus in Congress, do not expect any legislative results to emerge. This Congress is broken, it no longer functions, and it will not be fixed until mid-terms.

If then.