Like many Americans, I’m still stunned about the 2024 election. In fact, it still feels a bit unreal. The morning after, I decided to suspend my Facebook and Threads accounts for mental health reasons. Doom-scrolling for countless hours will hurt your brain. But enough of that.
Over the past few years, I’ve been studying areas of history, historiography, and the philosophy of history not normally taught in U.S. universities. In particular, I’m focusing on the longue durée. You’ll sometimes see this perspective used “safely” with regard to geography and climate. However, political historians in my country tend to ignore it, chiefly because too many of its practitioners rely on the analysis of Marxian class structures and how they play out over time.
Longue durée historians have pointed out features of the current world capitalist system that the majority of mainstream historians cannot or will not accept. For example, conventional historians must reject the idea that institutional racism often arises naturally out of monopoly capitalism, colonial extraction economies, imperialism, etc. Defenders of the status quo will develop all sorts of elaborate explanations for concentrations of extreme wealth and dire poverty. These explanations serve to divert attention away from the fundamental economic and political structures and relationships that create and recreate similar conditions around the world and across the centuries. The simplest way to protect the system is to insist that this is simply “the way the world is,” and to act as though none of these things are related to one another.
If we ignore these diversions, however, we can set aside the notion that racism is an unexpected flaw — some errant, isolated problem, a vestige of our primitive past, or an unfortunate byproduct of multi-ethnic societies. We can instead recognize it as an identifying feature. In fact, this feature expresses itself over and over. Expanding empires (and settler colonialists) tend to create elaborate explanations, often couched in pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, to justify the enslavement, expulsion (including deportation), imprisonment, and murder of supposedly inferior people. This sort of racism must always inflame the fear of the other, so that subsequent violent actions can be framed as defending property, jobs, “our way of life,” virtuous women, helpless children, etc. If that fear translates into blind rage, so much the better.
Another way in which the longue durée helps us understand where we are and how we got here is recognizing the same groups and classes as they sometimes struggle against one another and at other times work with one another in awkward, unstable political coalitions. In future posts, I hope to show how these same political groups confront threats, often lethal threats, only to repeat the same mistakes. If we look at events over the wide sweep of time, we see that history may not repeat, but the same recognizable actors appear in familiar situations.
I will argue, for example, that liberals in the Lockean tradition feel bound to defend property, often to the point of sacrificing the whole shebang, rather than bend on that core principle. We will also see that liberals acting within center-left coalitions present themselves as champions of common sense, regularly chastising leftists for speaking up on “dangerous” issues, while always overestimating the number of center-right allies who will come to the rescue of the state.
You may have to wait a while between posts, but I promise I’ll try to keep plugging away.
— Tim
Tim Widowfield
Latest posts by Tim Widowfield (see all)
- How Did We Get Here? Part 1 - 2024-11-21 01:22:29 GMT+0000
- What Did Marx Say Was the Cause of the American Civil War? (Part 1) - 2024-05-12 19:09:26 GMT+0000
- How Did Scholars View the Gospels During the “First Quest”? (Part 1) - 2024-01-04 00:17:10 GMT+0000
If you enjoyed this post, please consider donating to Vridar. Thanks!