A few people here and there are flying the US flag upside down. Some flags are at half-mast. Between politics and Covid, many people are in a down mood, maybe angry, maybe depressed. I learned about Jon Grinspan, curator of US political history at the Smithsonian Museum, the other day and his book "The Age of Acrimony." I have been reading it and I have posted several passages in my Twitter account.
He wrote the book for currently living people who actually grew up, he says, in a calmer, more polite and restrained political time than has been typical of the United States. "The Age of Acrimony" focuses on the period 1865 to 1915. Grinspan says now THAT was a nasty and acrimonious time.
This is the fundamental paradox of their era—and perhaps of our own. Americans bemoaned the failure of their democracy, but also joined in its worst habits with a zealous fixation.
In particular, why participate in a government that so many agreed was broken, rigged, and rotten?
How could a system be so popular and so unpopular at the same time? This paradox has not been resolved, partly because we tend to associate this period with the politics of conspiracy. At the time, bigots blamed the nation's problems on Reconstruction's African American politicians, or Irish Catholic machines, or German anarchists, or Jewish socialists. Since the Progressive Era, many have focused on the (far more real) guilt of tycoons and lobbyists, in an age of yawning income inequality.
How could a system be so popular and so unpopular at the same time? This paradox has not been resolved, partly because we tend to associate this period with the politics of conspiracy. At the time, bigots blamed the nation's problems on Reconstruction's African American politicians, or Irish Catholic machines, or German anarchists, or Jewish socialists. Since the Progressive Era, many have focused on the (far more real) guilt of tycoons and lobbyists, in an age of yawning income inequality.
What? Blame others? Who would do that?
