i'll repeat it, for your
> convenience: your propensity to invoke contingent events as
> proof that your ideology is Right, and to do so with a very
> specific kind of valedictory tone, is distinctly reaganite.
> it has little to do with who you voted for and much to do
> with a discursive style unknown prior to the rise of a shrill
> neoconservatism bent on demonstrating its rectitude with bor-
> ing regularity.
I've been watching this exchange with some, umm, fascination. Don't ask why: I don't know.
Anyway: the predeliction to interpret contingent events as justifying one's worldview is not Reaganite--it did not begin or end with him. Else, there would be no need for Doug to inveigh against the catastrophists flitting about the left, as they have for 150 years now. (Catastrophists and crisis theorists, I might add, have been among the most interesting members of the ill-defined community of the left: Mike Davis, the Regulation School, James O'Connor, etc.) It may be that they are wrong, but they did not start doing so with Reagan. Twas, as I recall, Marx's whole dialectical speel about the concrete and the abstract etc. etc. Minus the boring rectitude--at least from my point of view.
>
> you can argue that a handful of 'slick' technical policies
> have negated forces that might lead to a 'correction,' but
> i think that kind of argument is intensely naive. it fails
> to address hard-to-quantify cultural factors, which in the
> long run are much more powerful than social engineering by
> means of tax policies. 'imo,' natch.
>
> i'm real bullish on the cultural front.
Me too, but I thought the whole part about people getting up and putting on suits and basically refusing to do anything but buy (or rather, hold on to cash) *was* cultural. Tax policies that support the market, after all, don't say anything about how participants will act in the market--i.e. buying techs, selling whatever they are selling--which was the point of departure for this discussion. Wouldn't all that be due to the culture of the market in the U.S.?
All best Christian