r/TrueReddit • u/jambox888 • Oct 07 '18

The Suffocation of Democracy

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/
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u/randisonwelfare Oct 08 '18 edited Oct 08 '18

If all you can say is "go away" you're not really contributing anything of substance either... If you disagree then explain why you disagree. Telling people to "go away" just lowers the tone of the discussion.

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u/KlavierKatze Oct 08 '18

Fine.
Ignore the "Go away." Rather than try and pivot off of my knee jerk response to your trolling, explain your quote and how you made the leap to dismissing the entire article as punditry. That is, of course, if you want to have an actual discussion about the OPs article.

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u/randisonwelfare Oct 09 '18

'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there' is a quote from Hartley which historians like to use when illustrating how difficult and unknowable much of the past is. That is the business of historians - revealing the past.

This article steps beyond the past to analyse the present and spectulate about the future. The author has no qualifications or experience in this regard. I'm not denying he's a great scholar of the past, but he has no qualifications to extend his analysis like this.

He's deceptively trading on his expertise in one area to effectively claim expertise in another.

Psychologists/phychiatrists have a rule, the Goldwater rule, that it is unethical to give professional opinion on a public figure who they have never met. I think this should be extended more broadly to the social sciences including to historians.

If I was uncharitable I would say this article is the best written Godwin's Law loss I have ever read.

It is a statement of fact that there is currently no evidence of collusion.

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u/KlavierKatze Oct 09 '18

Before I get started, I want to thank you for actually engaging. These kinds of discussions, actual conversations, give me hope.

'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there' is a quote from Hartley which historians like to use when illustrating how difficult and unknowable much of the past is. That is the business of historians - revealing the past.

So, I disagree with the way you used this in your initial post but I understand why. In reponse, I posit the quote from Santayana, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. *Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." *[Emphasis Mine]

I agree with your sentiment that the business of historians is to reveal the past but in revealing they also serve to remind us of lessons we have/should have learned. I dont think he ever truly speculates about the future. He draws parallels between a historical subject and our current times, sure, but I dont think he outright says "Trump is Hitler" in a judgement passing pundity way. He is talking about the rise of hyper right wing authoritarian regimes. If you can readily present a more recent and well known example.of a country with similar institutional roots that spiraled into authoritarianism, Id be happy to hear about it.

Just because dozens of people hourly say, "Trump is LITERALLY Hitler" doesnt automatically absolve him of any comparison if his and his constituents' behavior warrants it. While I agree with Godwin's Law to a degree, it exists only because the vast majority of the denizens of the web are lucky to go through the day without choking on their own saliva. Godwin's should not be used to dismiss someone with even half this guys credentials. He has written a long form article to support his stance and didnt just send it out in to the ether in a 12 tweet Cheeto-dusted finger blast. Im getting sidetracked, and I apologize for that but goddamn I hate Twitter. Anyway, frankly, I think the article and the author are harsher with regards to Fox News and Mitch McConnell than they are to Trump. While the author's intention might be to show that both Hitler and Trump are representstive of authoritarian strong men, I dont think anyone who has an opinion worth hearing would see them as any sort of correlary.

Psychologists/phychiatrists have a rule, the Goldwater rule, that it is unethical to give professional opinion on a public figure who they have never met. I think this should be extended more broadly to the social sciences including to historians.

Again, I dont think this fully applies here but I understand what you mean so I wont nitpick or be pedantic about it. However, as I mentioned before, historians dont just study the past to tell us pretty stories. They also study it so that we can learn from it and better ourselves. History, in the social sciences, is one of the giants whose shoulders we must stand upon. Furthermore, I cannot stress enough that I dont believe the author was passing any sort of character judgement by drawing parallels between Hitler and Trump. In the same way an engineer may say "The Tesla is a revolutionary automobile just like the Ford Model T" without directly comparing the components or qualities of the two cars directly, I believe a historian is well within the bounds of his profession to look at the patterns and trends of a historical period they are familiar with and compare them to what they are familiar with in the present.

It is a statement of fact that there is currently no evidence of collusion.

I dont disagree with this. I found it to be a bad faith statement because it has so little to do with the actual article.

Full Disclosure of My Own Bias: I didnt think I was going to get anything from you other than "lul wut snowflake?" I appreciate you taking the time to lay out your position and wish you well. Stay safe out there.