To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present. — 13: 168-168
passionately stirred by the spirit of the times, — 140: 2056-2057
Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever — 208: 3058-3061
Early in the year, Federalists and Republicans in Congress, keen to avoid a repetition of the confusion of 1796, held a meeting to decide on their party’s presidential nominee. They called this meeting a “caucus.” (The word is an Americanism; it comes from an Algonquian word for “adviser.”) — 213: 3134-3136
Lincoln bemoaned the suppression of plain talk about slavery, the endless avoidance of the question at hand. “You must not say anything about it in the free states because it is not here. You must not say anything about it in the slave states because it is there. You must not say anything about it in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say anything about it in politics because that will disturb the security of ‘my place.’ There is no place to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say yourself it is a wrong.” And, as to the wrongness of slavery, he called it tyranny, and the idea of its naturalness as much an error as a belief in the divine right of kings. — 364: 5396-5401
the flag of the Underground Railroad — 366: 5411-5411
the flag of the Subterranean Pass-Way, his more militant version of the Underground Railroad. — 366: 5420-5420
“Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” “We hold these truths to be Self Evident; That All Men are Created Equal,” it began, proceeding to establish a right to revolution: — 370: 5484-5486
In 1871 she announced, “We are plotting revolution.” Woodhull said she ran “mainly for the purpose of drawing attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man.” — 422: 6256-6257
Douglass pressed. “The question now is,” he said, eyeing the crowd of rowdy delegates, silenced by his booming voice, “Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?” — 423: 6270-6271
In a Fourth of July oration in 1877, he declared, “No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”71 — 439: 6510-6512
The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, in which he insisted that any true representation of the American nation had to be honest, and that, as much as he wished he could tell the story of America as a story of progress, the truth was different. From slavery to Jim Crow, the history of the United States, he argued, “involves the necessity of plain speaking of wrongs and outrages endured, and of rights withheld, and withheld in flagrant contradiction to boasted American Republican liberty and civilization.” — 460: 6820-6825
“I am not advocating anything revolutionary,” Roosevelt himself said. “I am advocating action to prevent anything revolutionary.” — 482: 7146-7147
In a 5–4 decision in Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a state law establishing that bakers could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week, on the ground that the law violated a business owner’s liberty of contract, the freedom to forge agreements with his workers, something the court’s majority said was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. The laissez-faire conservatism of the court was informed, in part, by social Darwinism, which suggested that the parties in disputes should be left to battle it out, and if one side had an advantage, even so great an advantage as a business owner has over its employees, then it should win. In a dissenting opinion in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of violating the will of the people. “This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,” he began. The court, he said, had also wildly overreached its authority and had carried social Darwinism into the Constitution. “A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” Holmes wrote. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”33 — 485: 7188-7197
“Democracy is never a thing done,” he said in 1939. “Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.” — 630: 9353-9354
In directing the Office of Facts and Figures, MacLeish hoped not to produce propaganda but instead to educate the public about the danger of it. One of his office’s earliest pamphlets, Divide and Conquer, relied heavily on Taylor’s book to explain to Americans how the Nazi strategy of terror had worked in France. To illustrate, it quoted Mein Kampf. “At the bottom of their hearts the great masses of the people are more likely to be poisoned than to be consciously and deliberately bad,” Hitler had written. “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.” MacLeish’s pamphlet aimed to defeat Nazi propaganda: “The United States is now subject to a total barrage of the Nazi strategy of terror. Hitler thinks Americans are suckers. By the very vastness of his program of lies, he hopes to frighten us into believing that the Nazis are invincible.”54 Dorothy Thompson, who once described Mein Kampf as “eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction,” had long been making the same argument. “The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” she said. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a — 631: 9357-9368
In this same spirit, MacLeish insisted that his office wouldn’t take positions but instead would give people the figures and facts: “The duty of government is to provide a basis for judgment; and when it goes beyond that, it goes beyond the prime scope of its duty.” Journalists were doubtful. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized: “OFF is just going to superimpose its own ‘well organized facts’ upon the splendid confusion, interpret the interpreters, redigest those who now digest the digesters, explain what those who explain what the explainers of the explanations mean, and co-ordinate the coordinators of those appointed to co-ordinate the co-ordinations of the co-ordinated.” — 632: 9372-9377
Joining a tradition of American oratory that dated back to the day Frederick Douglass concluded that he could make a better argument against slavery if he decided the Constitution was on his side instead of against him, King called this protest an American protest. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation—we couldn’t do this,” he said, pausing for the thunder of assent. “If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime—we couldn’t do this.” It was as if the roof might fall. “But the great glory of American democracy,” his voice swelled, “is the right to protest for right.” — 748: 11101-11105
But, as Galbraith had pointed out in The Affluent Society, poverty hadn’t been eradicated; it had only been forgotten. “Few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue,” Galbraith wrote. “Inequality has ceased to preoccupy men’s minds.” Some of the poor were far away from the cities and the suburbs: one-fourth of those who lived below the “poverty line” worked on farms. In the Kennedy administration, the War on Poverty had its origins in January 1963, after Kennedy read a long essay by Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker, “Our Invisible Poor.” No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Prosperity, Macdonald argued, had left the nation both blinded to the plight of the poor and indifferent to their suffering. “There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them,” Macdonald wrote, in a scathing indictment of the attitude of the American middle class toward those less well off. “Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It’s just boring.”50 — 782: 11613-11623
Johnson also persuaded Congress to pass a tax bill, a tax cut that had been introduced into Congress before Kennedy’s assassination, the largest tax cut in American history. He hoped it would relieve unemployment. Instead, it undermined his reform programs. It was as if he’d cut off one of his own feet. “I want to turn the poor from tax eaters to taxpayers,” Johnson said, selling his tax cut to Congress. In this formulation, recipients of social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), created in 1935, and Medicaid, created in 1965, were the tax eaters. Recipients of other kinds of federal assistance (Medicare, veterans’ benefits, farm subsidies) were the taxpayers. By making this distinction, 1960s liberals crippled liberalism. The architects of the War on Poverty, like the New Dealers before them, never defended a broad-based progressive income tax as a public good, in everyone’s interest; nor could they separate it from issues of race. They also never referred to Social Security, health care, and unemployment insurance as “welfare.” Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers told him that when explaining how the government might fight poverty, he ought to “avoid completely the use of the term ‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution.’” The poor were to be referred to as “targets of opportunity.”70 At first, the tax cut worked: people used the money they once used to pay taxes to buy goods. In 1965, Time put Keynes on the cover and announced, “We Are All Keynesians Now.”71 But, as with everything Johnson did, his economic reforms were demolished by his escalation of the war in Vietnam. — 791: 11746-11760
Personal computing enthusiasts liked to invoke “the power of the people,” but they meant the power of the individual person, fortified with a machine. — 891: 13244-13245
By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn’t describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men, feeding, in particular, both longstanding resentment of African Americans and newly repurposed resentment of immigrants. Together, both Left and Right adopted both a politics and a cultural style animated by indictment and indignation. — 899: 13356-13361
Whatever their political differences, they shared a political style. In a time of accelerating change, both the Far Left and the Far Right came to understand history itself as a plot, an understanding advanced by the very formlessness of the Internet, anonymous and impatient. Online, the universe appeared to be nothing so much as an array of patterns in search of an explanation, provided to people unwilling to trust to any authority but that of their own fevered, reckless, and thrill-seeking political imaginations. — 932: 13850-13854