Posts Tagged ‘development’
“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”*…
Our first three years are usually a blur, and we don’t remember much before age seven. Kristin Ohlson wondered why…
… Freud argued that we repress our earliest memories because of sexual trauma but, until the 1980s, most researchers assumed that we retained no memories of early childhood because we created no memories – that events took place and passed without leaving a lasting imprint on our baby brains. Then in 1987, a study by the Emory University psychologist Robyn Fivush and her colleagues dispelled that misconception for good, showing that children who were just 2.5 years old could describe events from as far as six months into their past.
But what happens to those memories? Most of us assume that we can’t recall them as adults because they’re just too far back in our past to tug into the present, but this is not the case. We lose them when we’re still children…
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To form long-term memories, an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment. The raw material of memory – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences – arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, a brain structure named for its supposed resemblance to a sea horse, located under the cerebral cortex. The hippocampus not only bundles multiple input from our senses together into a single new memory, it also links these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations to similar ones already stored in the brain. But some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.
‘So much has to happen biologically to store a memory,’ the psychologist Patricia Bauer of Emory University told me. There’s ‘a race to get it stabilised and consolidated before you forget it. It’s like making Jell-O: you mix the stuff up, you put it in a mould, and you put it in the refrigerator to set, but your mould has a tiny hole in it. You just hope your Jell-O – your memory – gets set before it leaks out through that tiny hole.’
In addition, young children have a tenuous grip on chronology. They are years from mastering clocks and calendars, and thus have a hard time nailing an event to a specific time and place. They also don’t have the vocabulary to describe an event, and without that vocabulary, they can’t create the kind of causal narrative that [that’s] at the root of a solid memory. And they don’t have a greatly elaborated sense of self, which would encourage them to hoard and reconsider chunks of experience as part of a growing life-narrative.
Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. A recent study by the neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto suggests that this process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.
Our memories can become distorted by other people’s memories of the same event or by new information, especially when that new information is so similar to information already in storage. For instance, you meet someone and remember their name, but later meet a second person with a similar name and become confused about the name of the first person. We can also lose our memories when the synapses that connect neurons decay from disuse. ‘If you never use that memory, those synapses can be recruited for something different,’ Bauer told me.
Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present, according to Bauer. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on…
Why we remember so little from our youngest years: “The great forgetting,” from @kristinohlson in @aeonmag.
* Steven Wright
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As we stroll down memory lane, we might spare a thought for Benjamin McLane Spock; he died on this date in 1998. The first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children’s needs and family dynamics, he collected his findings in a 1946 book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which was criticized in some academic circles as being too reliant on anecdotal evidence, and in some conservative circles for promoting (what Norman Vincent Peale and others called) “permissiveness” by parents. Despite that push-back, it became one of the best-selling volumes in history, having sold at the time of Spock’s death in 1998 over 50 million copies in 40 languages.
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable”*…
Over the last decade there has emerged a growing and influential intellectual movement focused on progress— how it happens and how to speed it up. Fomented by thinkers like Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collison, the movement has raised tantalizing prospects… and some real fears about the risks that experimental, entrepreneurial efforts to accelerate advancement might entail: will enthusiasm outrun safeguards? And who gets to define what represents “progress” anyway?
Jason Crawford, another leader of the progress movement addresses these concerns…
In one sense, the concept of progress is simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial. In another sense, it contains an entire worldview.
The most basic meaning of “progress” is simply advancement along a path, or more generally from one state to another that is considered more advanced by some standard. (In this sense, progress can be good, neutral, or even bad—e.g., the progress of a disease.) The question is always: advancement along what path, in what direction, by what standard?
“Scientific progress,” “technological progress,” and “economic progress” are relatively straightforward. They are hard to measure, they are multi-dimensional, and we might argue about specific examples—but in general, scientific progress consists of more knowledge, better theories and explanations, a deeper understanding of the universe; technological progress consists of more inventions that work better (more powerfully or reliably or efficiently) and enable us to do more things; economic progress consists of more production, infrastructure, and wealth.
“Scientific progress,” “technological progress,” and “economic progress” are relatively straightforward. They are hard to measure, they are multi-dimensional, and we might argue about specific examples—but in general, scientific progress consists of more knowledge, better theories and explanations, a deeper understanding of the universe; technological progress consists of more inventions that work better (more powerfully or reliably or efficiently) and enable us to do more things; economic progress consists of more production, infrastructure, and wealth.
But this form of progress is not an end in itself. True progress is advancement toward the good, toward ultimate values—call this “ultimate progress,” or “progress in outcomes.” Defining this depends on axiology; that is, on our theory of value.
[Crawford unpacks humanist and biocentrist values as examples…]
… What are we talking about when we refer to “progress” unqualified, as in “the progress of mankind” or “the roots of progress”?
“Progress” in this sense is the concept of material progress, social progress, and human progress as a unified whole. It is based on the premise that progress in capabilities really does on the whole lead to progress in outcomes. This doesn’t mean that all aspects of progress move in lockstep—they don’t. It means that all aspects of progress support each other and over the long term depend on each other; they are intertwined and ultimately inseparable…
David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity, is even more explicit, saying that progress includes “improvements not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare.”
Skepticism of this idea of progress is sometimes expressed as: “progress towards what?” The undertone of this question is: “in your focus on material progress, you have lost sight of social and/or human progress.” On the premise that different forms of progress are diverging and even coming into opposition, this is an urgent challenge; on the premise that progress a unified whole, it is a valuable intellectual question but not a major dilemma.
“Progress” is also an interpretation of history according to which all these forms of progress have, by and large, been happening.
In this sense, the study of “progress” is the intersection of axiology and history: given a standard of value, are things getting better?
In Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, the bulk of the chapters are devoted to documenting this history. Many of the charts in that book were sourced from Our World in Data, which also emphasizes the historical reality of progress.
Not everyone agrees with this concept of progress. It depends on an Enlightenment worldview that includes confidence in reason and science, and a humanist morality…
[Crawford reviews critiques of “progress” and unpacks the disastrous history of “progress” thinking– which contributed to totalitarianism– in the 20th century…]
… To move forward, we need a wiser, more mature idea of progress.
Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It depends on choice and effort. It is up to us.
Progress is not automatically good. It must be steered. Progress always creates new problems, and they don’t get solved automatically. Solving them requires active focus and effort, and this is a part of progress, too.
Material progress does not automatically lead to moral progress. Technology within an evil social system can do more harm than good. We must commit to improving morality and society along with science, technology, and industry.
With these lessons well learned, we can rescue the idea of progress and carry it forward into the 21st century and beyond…
Agree? “What is Progress?” from @jasoncrawford.
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we analyze advancement, we might spare a thought for George Westinghouse; he died on this date in 1914. An engineer, inventor, and industrialist, he built his first fortune marketing the railroad air brake that he invented. But he soon turned his attention to the emerging electrical industry– of which he became a pioneer. He acquired the rights to inventor Nikola Tesla‘s brushless AC induction motor (the initial “engine” of everything electric from industrial motors to household appliances) along with patents for a new type of electric power distribution, polyphase alternating current… which put Westinghouse into direct competition with Thomas Edison, who was promoting direct current. (In the end, AC came to dominate.)
“The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers”*…
As scholars like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowan have begun to call out a slowing of progress and growth in the U.S., others are beginning to wonder if “innovation clusters” like Silicon Valley are still advantageous. For example, Brian J. Asquith…
In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a short treatise with a provocative hypothesis. Cowen challenged his audience to look beyond the gleam of the internet and personal computing, arguing that these innovations masked a more troubling reality. Cowen contended that, since the 1970s, there has been a marked stagnation in critical economic indicators: median family income, total factor productivity growth, and average annual GDP growth have all plateaued…
In the years since the publication of the Great Stagnation hypothesis, others have stepped forward to offer support for this theory. Robert Gordon’s 2017 The Rise and Fall of American Growth chronicles in engrossing detail the beginnings of the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States, starting around 1870, the acceleration of growth spanning the 1920–70 period, and then a general slowdown and stagnation since about 1970. Gordon’s key finding is that, while the growth rate of average total factor productivity from 1920 to 1970 was 1.9 percent, it was just 0.6 percent from 1970 to 2014, where 1970 represents a secular trend break for reasons still not entirely understood. Cowen’s and Gordon’s insights have since been further corroborated by numerous research papers. Research productivity across a variety of measures (researchers per paper, R&D spending needed to maintain existing growth rates, etc.) has been on the decline across the developed world. Languishing productivity growth extends beyond research-intensive industries. In sectors such as construction, the value added per worker was 40 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 1970. The trend is mirrored in firm productivity growth, where a small number of superstar firms see exceptionally strong growth and the rest of the distribution increasingly lags behind.
A 2020 article by Nicholas Bloom and three coauthors in the American Economic Review cut right to the chase by asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” and answered its own question in the affirmative.6 Depending on the data source, the authors find that while the number of researchers has grown sharply, output per researcher has declined sharply, leading aggregate research productivity to decline by 5 percent per year.
This stagnation should elicit greater surprise and concern because it persists despite advanced economies adhering to the established economics prescription intended to boost growth and innovation rates: (1) promote mass higher education, (2) identify particularly bright young people via standardized testing and direct them to research‑intensive universities, and (3) pipe basic research grants through the university system to foster locally-driven research and development networks that supercharge productivity…
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… the tech cluster phenomenon stands out because there is a fundamental discrepancy between how the clusters function in practice versus their theoretical contributions to greater growth rates. The emergence of tech clusters has been celebrated by many leading economists because of a range of findings that innovative people become more productive (by various metrics) when they work in the same location as other talented people in the same field. In this telling, the essence of innovation can be boiled down to three things: co-location, co-location, co-location. No other urban form seems to facilitate innovation like a cluster of interconnected researchers and firms.
This line of reasoning yields a straightforward syllogism: technology clusters enhance individual innovation and productivity. The local nature of innovation notwithstanding, technologies developed within these clusters can be adopted and enjoyed globally. Thus, while not everyone can live in a tech cluster, individuals worldwide benefit from new advances and innovations generated there, and some of the outsized economic gains the clusters produce can then be redistributed to people outside of the clusters to smooth over any lingering inequalities. Therefore, any policy that weakens these tech clusters leads to a diminished rate of innovation and leaves humanity as a whole poorer.
Yet the fact that the emergence of the tech clusters has also coincided with Cowen’s Great Stagnation raises certain questions. Are there shortcomings in the empirical evidence on the effects of the tech clusters? Does technology really diffuse across the rest of the economy as many economists assume? Do the tech clusters inherently prioritize welfare-enhancing technologies? Is there some role for federal or state action to improve the situation? Clusters are not unique to the postwar period: Detroit famously achieved a large agglomeration economy based on automobiles in the early twentieth century, and several authors have drawn parallels between the ascents of Detroit and Silicon Valley. What makes today’s tech clusters distinct from past ones? The fact that the tech clusters have not yielded the same society-enhancing benefits that they once promised should invite further scrutiny…
How could this be? What can we do about it? Eminently worth reading in full: “Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation?” (possible soft paywall), from @basquith827.
See also: Brad DeLong, on comments from Eric Schmidt: “That an externality market failure is partly counterbalanced and offset by a behavioral-irrationality-herd-mania cognitive failure is a fact about the world. But it does not mean that we should not be thinking and working very hard to build a better system—or that those who profit mightily from herd mania on the part of others should feel good about themselves.”
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As we contemplate co-location, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that a denizen of one of America’s leading tech/innovation hubs, Jay Forrester at MIT [see here and here], was awarded a patent for his coincident current magnetic core memory (Patent No. 2,736,880). Forrester’s invention, a “multicoordinate digital information storage device,” became the standard memory device for digital computers until supplanted by solid state (semiconductor) RAM in the mid-1970s.
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”*…
Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity. But, Manvir Singh asks, do we have the right measure of their success?…
[Last] September, Pope Francis became the first leader of the Catholic Church ever to visit Mongolia. It must have been a humbling stopover. The country has fewer than fifteen hundred Catholics. The welcoming ceremony, in Ulaanbaatar’s main square, attracted a few hundred spectators—a crowd less than a thousandth the size of one that had gathered to see him in Lisbon a month earlier. One of the attendees had come out to do his morning Tai Chi and unknowingly ended up at the event…
Not everyone understood why the Pontiff was there. A caterer at a banquet for the Vatican entourage asked a Times reporter, “What are Catholics again?” But the Pope came prepared. Speaking to diplomats, cultural leaders, and the Mongolian President, he celebrated the religious freedom protected under the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—“the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development.” He also celebrated “the Pax Mongolica,” the period of Mongol-enforced stability across Eurasia, citing its “absence of conflicts” and respect “of international laws.”
Many earlier Christians would have been staggered by Francis’s words…
[Singh recounts the long Christian– and Muslim– tradition of seeing the “Mogol Horde” as blood-thirsty savages…]
But Pope Francis was far from alone in challenging the old tropes. “We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueler.
The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.
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The idea that the Mongols were the architects of modernity is a mainstay of the new scholarship. Sattin presents an argument similar to Harl’s, adding the compass to the list of innovations sent westward, although he acknowledges that other nomads, such as the Arabs, helped deliver them to Europeans. Both authors are able to draw upon such earlier work as the anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” (2004), a charming, poetic, and laudatory introduction to the Mongols that, more than any other book, helped advance the steppe restoration.
All these chroniclers tell a similar story of the Mongols’ ascent. A modest, resourceful, and sometimes ruthless hunter-nomad named Temujin, having been abandoned by his clan as a nine-year-old, united the tribes of the eastern steppes for the first time in four centuries. In 1206, at a gathering of steppe leaders, he was bequeathed the title Chinggis Khan, which means something like “fierce” or “oceanic” ruler. (The English “Genghis” comes from translations of Persian sources.) In the next two decades, he and his followers became the first to bring under one dominion the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean, an area nearly as wide as the steppe itself.
After his death, in 1227, Genghis Khan’s domain continued to swell until it covered some twenty per cent of the world’s landmass, from Syria to Korea. In the east, his son Ogedei subdued northern China. When Kublai Khan, Genghis’ grandson, overtook the south, he unified the country and founded the Yuan dynasty…
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The steppe restoration shows the strengths—and the limitations—of the resplendent new discipline of “global history.” Often said to have begun around the start of the twenty-first century, this approach emerged amid the excitement of a commerce-connected, borderless world. In 2005, Thomas Friedman published his treatise of globalization, “The World Is Flat.” The next year, three academics started The Journal of Global History. Writing in the first issue, the British historian Patrick O’Brien declared that global history aimed to leave behind “the arrogance of Rome” as well as “the scientific and technological triumphalism of the West.” Rather than building stories around the greatness of Europe (or of the Caliphate, or Confucianism), he advocated for a study of “connexions” and “comparisons” that would also spotlight “the manifold achievements of more peoples, communities, and cultures over long spans of human history.”
The emerging discipline had to overcome centuries of historiographic hubris. Writing about other peoples has long been in service of self-glorification…
[Singh traces the habit from Herodotus through colonial/imperial histories to the more modern likes of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (1997), Niall Ferguson’s “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (2011), and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail” (2012), and Ian Morris’s “Why the West Rules—for Now.”]
Global history was supposed to transcend all such forms of parochialism, and this goal, at first, seems realized in the steppe restoration. The nomads, we are told, created cities, enforced peace, and guaranteed religious freedom. They encouraged trade and cultural interaction, recombining ideas, peoples, and technologies—with world-shaking consequences.
Yet a paradox runs through these books. Steppe peoples are most noteworthy, they seem to assure us, when they look like rich, settled societies. They have a role in “world history” insofar as they affect the rise and fall of sedentary, often European, polities. And so the steppe restoration ends up affirming the standards it set out to challenge.
Consider how historical significance is determined. Scholars routinely scoff at Hegel’s comment that history ended in the West, and yet the steppe restoration shows just how ingrained the notion remains…
The new global history has eagerly set out to establish that steppe nomads displayed key features of classic civilizations and liberal democracies—writing, urbanization, and apparently progressive values. But as long as these advances are considered signs of sophistication, nomads will come up short…
Global history’s professed aim of decentering world history requires a more sophisticated grasp of what sophistication looks like. In the case of nomadic societies, we need to shift our orientation from the static to the flexible, from social complexity embodied in brick and bureaucracies to something that dwells within networks: an ever-responsive capacity for large-scale collective action. What made nomads impressive, after all, is what made them unique. They lived in enormous, travelling societies. They subsumed diverse ethnic groups and could mobilize for war almost instantly. They overran the empires at their borders and ruled over them, sometimes for generations. Mongol organization reached its pinnacle in those hordes—self-sufficient, mobile units that contained as many as a hundred thousand people and that transported homes, statues, workshops, palaces, and supply lines. Through settled eyes, we might call these “moving cities,” yet the phrase misses their almost aqueous nature, their ability to restructure around births, departures, and political scuffles.
Historians have worked to show that, in Sattin’s words, “the nomad story is neither less wonderful nor less significant than ours.” But we’ll still be treating ourselves as the measure of everything unless we learn to revise our sense of significance. This may be the greatest gift a more global history offers us: greatness redefined…
The discipline of “global history,” shifting history away from nation-states toward trans-regional processes, was meant to leave behind the ethnocentrism of what had preceded it. The new steppe scholarship shows how tricky a task that is: “The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us,” from @mnvrsngh in @NewYorker.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we rethink the rudiments, we might recall that it was on this date in 27 BCE that Gaius Julius Caesar (born Gaius Octavius) was given the added honorific “Augustus” and became the first Roman Emperor.
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“Populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities”…
… and, as Rachel Kleinfeld explains, that doesn’t work out well for their economies…
In the 20th century, economic and political systems could be situated on a simple 2×2 grid. Economic policies ran from left to right, while political systems could be arrayed from authoritarian to democratic.
Most U.S. business pegged themselves easily on this spectrum: they wanted favorable regulation and management-friendly policies of the sort generally pursued by the right. And while a few opened up shop behind the Iron Curtain, CEOs knew business prospered most under classically liberal democratic systems that upheld the rule of law and inalienable rights—including property rights.
The rise of populism in the 21st century has overturned this game board. Today, even supposedly right-wing populists exploit distrust, pessimism, and anger to make the case that government should wield a heavy—and often retaliatory—hand in markets. But while such interference by authoritarian leaders could once be portrayed as undemocratic, modern populists often bask in electoral support. Voters cheer as their elected leaders undermine rights and the rule of law.
Populism, in other words, has shaken the kaleidoscope of 20th century political and economic identities—and acting as if those labels still apply could be catastrophic for market economies. Modern populists from the right use right-wing rhetoric to sell what used to be left-wing economic ideas. And many marry the electoral aspects of democracy with authoritarian tactics to undermine the rights, institutions, and norms that create a stable business environment.
Economic and historical studies show that even supposedly pro-business populism is bad for business; countries that elect one populist tend to elect others, its effects creep well past a single election cycle.
This matters because populists are getting elected at a rate last seen in the 1930s. In 2018, they presided over nearly a third of global GDP, including mega-countries like India. Next year, with 40 countries (accounting for 44% of global GDP) going to the polls, they could control even more. Some come from the left, particularly in Latin America. But as in the turbid 1930s, many populist leaders like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States hail from the right—deploying a trio of political strategies that characterize populists regardless of their avowed ideology.
First, populists win elections by deepening existing social divisions. By turning nearly every political question into a fight between a virtuous “us” and a deceitful, dangerous, disloyal “them” they create an intense base that is personally loyal to the leader and not any particular ideology. That base lets populists maintain strong voter support even as they centralize and personalize power, their second go-to tactic. Finally, by redefining democracy as majority rule, they can claim that anything that stands against their desires (as the embodiment of the majority) is anti-democratic. This rhetorical jujitsu lets them undermine checks and balances, once-independent institutions from judiciaries to statistical bodies, and the rule of law itself, depicting them as obstacles to taking radical steps to implement the majority’s wishes.
The dire economic effects of left-wing populism are well-researched. Leaders from Argentina’s Juan Perón to Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador nationalize businesses, politicize their management, and fill their ranks with supportive political appointees. They shower voters with government money come election time and overheat their economies. The result is often a short-term economic boom followed by a long, inflationary bust…
Using Victor Orbán and Hungary as an example, Kleinfeld demonstrates that right-wing populists are just as disastrous for their countries; the problem is not that the leader comes from the left or the right, it’s that they pursue the populist playbook.
Eminently worth reading in full. Aspiring autocrats keep ruining their countries’ economies: “The Economic Cost of Right-Wing Populism,” from @RachelKleinfeld in @JoinPersuasion.
[Image above from the co-published version of the article]
Apposite: Zeynep Tufekci with a diagnosis of the attractiveness of autocratic leaders: “A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.” (gift article). Not sure that I buy her sense that Trump has been working a careful and canny strategy from the start (2016); but her focus is on his adherents’ grievances and their response to his charisma and his self-anointed status as “the only one who can save [us]”… a provocative read.
* Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?
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As we contemplate civics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that pioneering political cartoonist Thomas Nast gave the Democratic Party its mascot:
On January 15, 1870, Nast published the cartoon [see below] that would forever link the donkey to the Democrat. A few ideas should be clear for the cartoon to make sense: First, “republican” and “democrat” meant very different things in the 19th century than they do today (but that’s another article entirely); “jackass” pretty much meant the exact same thing then that it does today; and Nast was a vocal opponent of a group of Northern Democrats known as “Copperheads.”
In his cartoon, the donkey, standing in for the Copperhead press, is kicking a dead lion, representing President Lincoln’s recently deceased press secretary (E.M. Stanton). With this simple but artfully rendered statement, Nast succinctly articulated his belief that the Copperheads, a group opposed the Civil War, were dishonoring the legacy of Lincoln’s administration. The choice of a donkey –that is to say, a jackass [understood at the time to be a play on “Jackson,” as populist Andrew Jackson was an inspiration to the Copperheads]– would be clearly understood as commentary intended to disparage the Democrats. Nast continue to use the donkey as a stand-in for Democratic organizations, and the popularity of his cartoons through 1880s ensured that the party remained inextricably tied to jackasses…
“Political Animals: Republican Elephants and Democratic Donkeys”- Smithsonian
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