Long Island was populated after WWII by an off-white Brooklyn diaspora (mostly Jews & Italians), who couldn't afford Manhattan, Westchester, Connecticut, or the tonier parts of New Jersey. White flight and white resentment has always been part of its political DNA. It is indeed relatively prosperous, but lags behind those other places.
It never had many Romney Republicans. The Long Island Republicans had all the political folkways of Brooklyn (ethnic voting, corruption, etc.), but transposed them to the local Republican party, in celebration of being free of postwar Brooklyn, which was grotty and declining. Unlike most other Republicans, they clove to the classic NYC high-tax high-service model of government.
Thanks for this, Ziggy. It's exactly the kind of thing the NY Times should be looking at before doing the usual vox pops of seven representative Trump voters. Long Island Republicans as you describe them, sound representative of a large part of the Republican base, more so than the barely literate Kentuckians the Times likes to imagine.
To be clear, by "Romney Republicans", I simply meant Republicans who voted for Romney in 2012. Romney ran as a "severely conservative" candidate, anti-immigration, opposed to equal marriage etc. But he rejected Trump's obvious evil (though even he did not advocate a vote for Harris). The voters of Long Island did not.
Thank you John for the article, as you know we having all sorts of similar problems (here in NZ). Bad policy being rushed through under urgency, no or very little public consultation. I hoping more woman get out and vote in both USA and here next time. I like to think (probably naively), they might be angry enough and concerned enough to get out and make a difference. Very scary what happening here in NZ (to me) and in the US.
It's simple. American Republicans are bewitched, under a spell of illusion woven by a mighty and malign sorcerer, Rupert Murdoch. As an expert witness to this, let me call on the ghost of the Italian magical realist writer Italo Calvino, in a remarkable passage from the introduction to his 1956 collection of Italian fairy tales, Fiabe italiane,1956. The translation is by Google, lightly edited by me - but my Italian is basic, and the English below does not do justice to a great writer. Emphasis added.
"Now that the book is finished, I can say that this was not a hallucination, a sort of occupational disease. It was rather a confirmation of something I already knew from the start, that something I mentioned before, that only conviction of mine that pushed me to travel among fairy tales; and that is that I believe this: fairy tales are true.
They are, taken all together, in their ever-repeated and ever-varied casuistry of human events, a general explanation of life, born in remote times and preserved in the slow rumination of peasant consciousness up to us; they are the catalogue of destinies that can be given to a man and a woman, especially for the part of life that is precisely the making of a destiny: youth, from birth that often carries within it an omen or a condemnation, to separation from home, to the trials of becoming an adult and then a mature one, to confirm oneself as a human being. And in this summary design, everything: the drastic division of the living into kings and paupers, but their substantial equality; the persecution of the innocent and their redemption as terms of a dialectic internal to every life; love encountered before knowing it and then immediately suffered as a lost good; <b>the common fate of being subject to enchantments, that is, of being determined by complex and unknown forces, and the effort to free oneself and self-determine understood as an elementary duty, together with that of freeing others, or rather the inability to free oneself alone, freeing oneself by freeing others</b>; faithfulness to a commitment and purity of heart as basic virtues that lead to salvation and triumph; beauty as a sign of grace, but which can be hidden under the guise of humble ugliness like the body of a frog; and above all the unitary substance of everything, men, beasts, plants, things, the infinite possibility of metamorphosis of what exists. "
Thank you, John, for the plain unvarnished statement of where the US and the rest of the world finds itself. While its important to understand 'what happened' in the US, the Democratic party and its highly paid punditocracy/consultantantocracy is, ironically, almost as reactionary as MAGA. While MAGA is longing to restore the glories of the 1870's, the DNC is longing to restore the glories of the 1960s or maybe the 1950s or maybe the 1930s ... the New Deal in any case. Even as, to celebrate the 249th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, MAGA Republicans basically repealed the Great Society, and the New Deal — and the MAGA Court was busy laying the groundwork for repealing the rest of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, the 'abundance' centrists have launched launched a internecine struggle over the magic words that will win back the supposedly liberal middle-class suburbanites. Your comments suggested to me that they're likely hunting a Snark. It has been years since I read the Hunting of the Snark. It may be the best picture of where the present situation in the US that I've read of late. Certainly more useful than 'Abundance'.
Writing this from Long Island …
Long Island was populated after WWII by an off-white Brooklyn diaspora (mostly Jews & Italians), who couldn't afford Manhattan, Westchester, Connecticut, or the tonier parts of New Jersey. White flight and white resentment has always been part of its political DNA. It is indeed relatively prosperous, but lags behind those other places.
It never had many Romney Republicans. The Long Island Republicans had all the political folkways of Brooklyn (ethnic voting, corruption, etc.), but transposed them to the local Republican party, in celebration of being free of postwar Brooklyn, which was grotty and declining. Unlike most other Republicans, they clove to the classic NYC high-tax high-service model of government.
Thanks for this, Ziggy. It's exactly the kind of thing the NY Times should be looking at before doing the usual vox pops of seven representative Trump voters. Long Island Republicans as you describe them, sound representative of a large part of the Republican base, more so than the barely literate Kentuckians the Times likes to imagine.
To be clear, by "Romney Republicans", I simply meant Republicans who voted for Romney in 2012. Romney ran as a "severely conservative" candidate, anti-immigration, opposed to equal marriage etc. But he rejected Trump's obvious evil (though even he did not advocate a vote for Harris). The voters of Long Island did not.
Thank you John for the article, as you know we having all sorts of similar problems (here in NZ). Bad policy being rushed through under urgency, no or very little public consultation. I hoping more woman get out and vote in both USA and here next time. I like to think (probably naively), they might be angry enough and concerned enough to get out and make a difference. Very scary what happening here in NZ (to me) and in the US.
It's simple. American Republicans are bewitched, under a spell of illusion woven by a mighty and malign sorcerer, Rupert Murdoch. As an expert witness to this, let me call on the ghost of the Italian magical realist writer Italo Calvino, in a remarkable passage from the introduction to his 1956 collection of Italian fairy tales, Fiabe italiane,1956. The translation is by Google, lightly edited by me - but my Italian is basic, and the English below does not do justice to a great writer. Emphasis added.
Download the whole book at https://www.nilalienum.it/Letteratura/Letteraturaitaliana/900/Calvino-Fiabe-Italiane.pdf
"Now that the book is finished, I can say that this was not a hallucination, a sort of occupational disease. It was rather a confirmation of something I already knew from the start, that something I mentioned before, that only conviction of mine that pushed me to travel among fairy tales; and that is that I believe this: fairy tales are true.
They are, taken all together, in their ever-repeated and ever-varied casuistry of human events, a general explanation of life, born in remote times and preserved in the slow rumination of peasant consciousness up to us; they are the catalogue of destinies that can be given to a man and a woman, especially for the part of life that is precisely the making of a destiny: youth, from birth that often carries within it an omen or a condemnation, to separation from home, to the trials of becoming an adult and then a mature one, to confirm oneself as a human being. And in this summary design, everything: the drastic division of the living into kings and paupers, but their substantial equality; the persecution of the innocent and their redemption as terms of a dialectic internal to every life; love encountered before knowing it and then immediately suffered as a lost good; <b>the common fate of being subject to enchantments, that is, of being determined by complex and unknown forces, and the effort to free oneself and self-determine understood as an elementary duty, together with that of freeing others, or rather the inability to free oneself alone, freeing oneself by freeing others</b>; faithfulness to a commitment and purity of heart as basic virtues that lead to salvation and triumph; beauty as a sign of grace, but which can be hidden under the guise of humble ugliness like the body of a frog; and above all the unitary substance of everything, men, beasts, plants, things, the infinite possibility of metamorphosis of what exists. "
Well said John ✊
Thank you, John, for the plain unvarnished statement of where the US and the rest of the world finds itself. While its important to understand 'what happened' in the US, the Democratic party and its highly paid punditocracy/consultantantocracy is, ironically, almost as reactionary as MAGA. While MAGA is longing to restore the glories of the 1870's, the DNC is longing to restore the glories of the 1960s or maybe the 1950s or maybe the 1930s ... the New Deal in any case. Even as, to celebrate the 249th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, MAGA Republicans basically repealed the Great Society, and the New Deal — and the MAGA Court was busy laying the groundwork for repealing the rest of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, the 'abundance' centrists have launched launched a internecine struggle over the magic words that will win back the supposedly liberal middle-class suburbanites. Your comments suggested to me that they're likely hunting a Snark. It has been years since I read the Hunting of the Snark. It may be the best picture of where the present situation in the US that I've read of late. Certainly more useful than 'Abundance'.
Thanks, again.