Periodically, I report to my readers how the blog is doing, especially in contrast with competing media that also want your eyeballs. I have noticed that the term “blog” is usually derisive, for there are millions of bloggers competing with academics and journalists, while many of the bloggers, unlike professors and writers for the major websites, lack the institutional legitimacy that makes them trustworthy.
The most important point in this blog is as follows: there is nothing I put up on the Yankee Doodle Society website that is in any way different than a paper I would present to fellow academics, or an article that I would submit to an academic publisher. Whether footnotes appear or not, they are always in my head; this does not imply that I am entirely objective, for we are all limited by life experience, preferred ideology, and our access to, and interest in, primary source materials.
Why is the blog, though relatively popular, not even more widely seen? Because “moderation” is hegemonic and my blogs have traced the mostly invisible rise of the moderate men. The New Left and the Frankfurt Institute refugees (the critical theorists) did not invent or advance the turn to culturalism in the 1930s, in tandem with the New Deal assault upon freedom and its attendant laissez-faire capitalism and so-called American “imperialism.” See for example, Barton Swaim’s WSJ review of a reissued book by Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, that ostensibly reveals the illegitimate domination of New Leftists and critical theorists–including Gramsci, their supposed inspiration– in the academy. What Swaim leaves out (besides the social psychologists affiliated with FDR) is the introduction of multiculturalism in the early 20th century by those intellectuals who would blot out the red specter of proletarian internationalism in favor of the “progressive” internationalism of Woodrow Wilson. And Woodrow Wilson is currently being rehabilitated by fellow corporatist liberals, despite his well-known racism.
(For the New Deal turn to cultural history at the expense of “economic determinism” and science, see https://clarespark.com/2009/12/12/switching-the-enlightenment-corporatist-liberalism-and-the-revision-of-american-history/.)
We find ourselves in the early stages of an election campaign for the American presidency, horribly distracted by terrorism in France and San Bernardino, while the media establishment has kittens over the popularity of businessman and populist outsider Donald J. Trump. Currently, I am reading Milton Friedman’s popular book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), for I have exhausted myself in writing about what I already studied in graduate school and in the years following: the Melville Revival, the chief actors in the rise of cultural history and modern social psychology, the many faces of antisemitism, the founding of Israel, ongoing resistance to modernity, the various forms of fascism, and psychological warfare in general.
Stay tuned, as I find points of agreement and disagreement with the “Chicago school” of economics, and whether or not there exists a decisive international population of “moderate Muslims” who will arouse themselves to brake the (“Islamist”) jihadists among them.
The Clare Spark Blog 