@tzimmer_history@mastodon.social
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tzimmer_history

@[email protected]

Historian at Georgetown - Democracy and Its Discontents - Contributing Opinion Writer Guardian US - Podcast: Is This Democracy https://anchor.fm/is-this-democracy - Newsletter: Democracy Americana https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/

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tzimmer_history, to random
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Rightwingers are promoting aggressive anti-bikeism as a key element of the reactionary political identity. Just the most destructive people, reflexively raging against anything coded “left” or “woke.” And so even the most universally beneficial trends and behavior are declared evil and “Un-American” 1/

tzimmer_history,
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This would all be very funny if we hadn’t seen these dynamics play out so many times before: Just think about how the Right discarded all ideas of “conserving” and instead adopted anti-environmentalism as dogma - with disastrous effects for the country and the world. 2/

tzimmer_history, to random
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Polls are not objective reflections of public opinion – they help construct that which they ostensibly just measure. But that also means they have a massive impact shaping political behavior.

And this one is really concerning – because “Biden too old” seems to dominate everything else.

🧵1/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/politics/biden-trump-2024-poll.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

tzimmer_history, to random
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This column by David French is entirely incoherent as the author fails miserably at distinguishing between what annoys him - the phrase “OK Boomer” becoming popular as a symbol of defiance and/or dismissiveness - vs. what is actually indicative of significant societal problems.

tzimmer_history, to random
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Shamefully silly to publish such utter nonsense even at the best of times - a complete disaster doing it in the current situation in which a paper that has adopted “Democracy dies in darkness” as its official slogan should have other things to alert and inform the public about.

Some thoughts: 1/

tzimmer_history, to random
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The Triumph of Weaponized Nostalgia

Past eras of stable white Christian patriarchal dominance are widely sanitized and mythologized in our political discourse.

A thread, outlining the key arguments of my new piece: 1/

tzimmer_history,
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Much of the political discourse is animated by a longing for a “golden age” that never actually existed. This pervasive sense of nostalgia blunts and undermines the mainstream response to the reactionary assault on democratic multiracial pluralism. 2/

tzimmer_history,
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The longing to turn the clock back is hardly confined to MAGA world. Two of the central, widely accepted diagnoses of our time, for instance, are both grounded in nostalgia: The narrative of “polarization” and the idea that “cancel culture” constitutes a national emergency. 3/

tzimmer_history,
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At the core of both the “polarization” and the “cancel culture” tales is the idea that it used to be better, that America is on a dangerous path away from an exemplary period in the recent past – a golden era of consensus and bipartisanship, or a golden era of free speech. 4/

tzimmer_history,
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Beyond offering a misleading interpretation of the present, the “polarization” narrative usually comes with a hefty dose of “golden age” nostalgia for a long-lost “consensus” – it tells a story of decline, suggesting that the status quo ante before the 60s was one of unity and order. 5/

tzimmer_history, to random
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Moralizing Nostalgia Leads to Bad History – and Helps the Anti-Democratic Right

David Brooks’ “How America Got Mean” offers an ahistorical tale that obscures rather than illuminates – and provides fertile ground for a politics of reaction.

A thread, based on my new piece: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/moralizing-nostalgia-leads-to-bad

tzimmer_history, to random
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Take the ability to block away, and Twitter immediately becomes utterly unusable for anyone who doesn’t revel in being overwhelmed by an avalanche of racist, misogynistic, bigoted filth - and that’s intentional, of course. An incitement of abuse.

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/elon-musk-x-twitter-block-feature-delete-1235699759/

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