On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 09:40 AM, Louis Proyect posted a review by JoeGrinspan of Eric Foner's The Age of Acrimony. Quoted from review:
> > Despite these omissions, The Age of Acrimony speaks directly to the > current moment, when grassroots upsurges are both forcing the political > system to confront longstanding inequalities and inspiring assaults on the > practice of democracy itself, as state after state seeks to limit the > right to vote. It reminds us that now, as then, American democracy is a > terrain of conflict, forever a work in progress. One difference between then and now that neither Grinspan nor Foner seems to address is the popularity of formal rhetoric then and its repudiation now. When Cicero codified his (from our point of view) strange and complex fusion of the legal profession, formal rhetoric, politics, and philosophy under the rubric of "Humanitas," he systematized something that persisted in its influence even through the so-called Dark Ages, and was revived in some glory--if with decided differences--during the Renaissance in Europe. Epithets like "the plumed knight," while not in themselves Ciceronian, embellished orations that still embodied that ideal and, like Cicero's orations--among the earliest to be literally transcribed and published as delivered--provided a way of canalizing the entertainment factor of politics, deadly as it was, and thereby capturing popular attention and security at least passive engagement with political issues. This tradition is now completely extinct except as a stuffed curiosity for consumers of "authentic" rare old fine ideas in the marketplace of ideas. With it, the metamorphosis of romantic individualism into an antisocial fungus of the mind--analogous to the fungus that eats away the hinder parts of cicadas, driving them to mimic mating indiscriminately with both sexes and disseminate fatal spores every where until death intervenes--is complete. "American democracy" isn't "a work in progress." It's a work of self-destruction that will certainly dumb itself down to death, destroying the capitalist economy and the one-dimensional consumer alike. This is a huge problem for the left whether one wishes it to be or not. We should not focus too long on similarities between the the present age and the Gilded Age. Those similarities are real, but It's the sinister differences that are killing us. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#8900): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8900 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83232885/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
