Puritans Still In America?

The Article: Are Americans Still Puritan? by Matthew Hutson in The New York Times.

The Text: “I THINK I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores,” the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after visiting the United States in the 1830s. Was he right? Do present-day Americans still exhibit, in their attitudes and behavior, traces of those austere English Protestants who started arriving in the country in the early 17th century?

It seems we do. Consider a series of experiments conducted by researchers led by the psychologist Eric Luis Uhlmann and published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In one study, they investigated whether the work habits of today’s Americans reflected the so-called Protestant work ethic. Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that work was a calling from God. They also believed in predestination and viewed success as a sign of salvation. This led to belief in success as a path to salvation: hard work and good deeds would bring rewards, in life and after.

In the study, American and Canadian college students were asked to solve word puzzles involving anagrams. But first, some were subtly exposed to (or “primed” with) salvation-related words like “heaven” and “redeem,” while others were exposed to neutral words. The researchers found that the Americans — but not the Canadians — solved more anagrams with salvation on the mind. They worked harder.

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The Difference Between Reagan And Obama?

What say you to this news, FOX?

Another Turn Of The Screw

The Article: Another Turn of the Screw by Susan Watkins in The New Left Review.

The Text: Not long ago depicted as a paragon of international virtues, the European Union has become synonymous with never-ending financial instability, the words ‘euro’ and ‘crisis’ now automatically conjoined. Anglo-Saxons are impatient: the US and UK have succeeded in shoring up their broken banks and rolling over their debts through state recapitalizations, bond purchases, money printing and devaluation; why can’t Europe do the same? Merkel’s government has been accused of failing to grasp that this is a banking crisis, not just one of sovereign debt. Headlines clamour for the adoption of the latest trans-Atlantic palliative: first bail-out loan funds, ECB bond purchases, quantitative easing; now direct lending to banks, deposit insurance, regional regulation and eurobonds, or issuance of collective debt. Germany, given leave in crisis conditions to assume an open leadership role in Europe—a position the Maastricht Treaty was designed to neutralize—has naturally asserted its own interests in the process of exercising its hegemony. Loth to become the guarantor of other states’ bank and sovereign debt, it is determined to get as much as possible in exchange.

But the new hegemon has been a lame one, as Perry Anderson has argued. [1] Berlin begrudges having to underwrite stop-gap measures to prop up the Eurozone’s over-leveraged banks, and thereby British and US ones, via its debt-burdened states; but it is incapable of implementing a decisive alternative programme to restructure the unsustainable banking sector, rather than patch it up. The flawed design of the euro, a currency without an accountable sovereign state, is coming under intolerable pressure, as Michel Aglietta describes below. [2] But Europe’s oligarchies baulk at the genuine political union—a true democratic federation—that NLR and others have historically championed. Germany’s strategic aims in the crisis are more limited. It has fought for decades to safeguard its manufacturing base, battered (as was Japan’s) by US exchange rates in the 1980s and now challenged by the rise of China. The geo-political dimension of European monetary union, as a prospective reserve currency to rival the dollar, will not be abandoned lightly; it was one reason for opening the Eurozone to so many peripheral economies, despite the core states’ determination to avoid the federal social responsibilities that political union would bring. Berlin now aims to tighten the Eurozone system, to defend the gains it represents for Germany and to squeeze the bloc into a more competitive position vis-à-vis its rivals to the east and west. Beneath the hubbub of the headlines, this new European integration project is well underway. What political forms is it taking—and what opposition is it likely to meet?

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ID-ing Curiosity

Thank God Donald Trump wasn’t around.

Gore Vidal On Mencken

The Article: H. L. Mencken by Gore Vidal from the 1991 book The Impossible H.L. Mencken.

The Text: After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. American exceptions to mediocrity’s leaden mean: From column A, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt. From column B, H. L. Mencken.

Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche, and a school of Samuel Johnson compiler of The American Language, he never ceased to be a journalist for the Sunpapers in his hometown of Baltimore, where he was born in 1880 and where he died in 1956. From 1906 to 1948, he was connected with the Baltimore Sun, as a columnist, feature writer, editor. He was the most influential journalist of his day; he was also the wittiest.

As a working journalist, Mencken took as his lifelong subject nothing less than Freedom’s land and Bravery’s home, the (not so very) United States, where flourished such gorgeous clowns as Calvin Coolidge; “The Great Croon of Croons,” Franklin D. Roosevelt; the not-so-great Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan; and many, many others. But if only God could have invented such a cast, it was Mencken who proved to be God’s most attentive and appreciative drama critic. It was Mencken who described the show. He reveled in absurdity; found no bonnet entirely bee-less. He loved the national bores for their own sweet sake.

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