The mood of conservatism had rapidly shifted from Reaganesque optimism and belief that the future would be better than the past to a much darker mood in which many valuable things—perhaps the country itself—were slipping from the grips of “normal Americans.”

All intellectual ideas undergo a certain simplification by the time they are used by mass movements of any stripe

salvation of Western civilization

The Progressives favored a ‘living constitution,’ which in their account was said to be wholly at odds with the actual Constitution

Methodologically, the approach that Pestritto took from Kesler, and that eventually filtered down to Beck and other popular conservatives, was to analyze Progressives’ thought largely independent of the political conflicts in which they were engaged—regulating railroads, reforming urban police departments, fighting big-city political machines. Such abstraction, perhaps inherently, has a tendency to accentuate the movement’s more radical pretensions and to deflect from the nature of the opposition that Progressives faced.

traumatic

You can never waste a good crisis

hey don’t need to go to Congres

The wrong response to Tea Party fundamentalism is to respond in kind and simply hunker down in an alternative belief system

The sixteenth-century wars of religion, the English Civil War of the 1640s, and the French Revolution, which also became a civil war, show how difficult it is for democracy to recover from the deep wounds inflicted when civil war destroys the ethic of reciprocity on which democracy depends

He learned to think about American history and politics in the way most scholars now see it

when he decided to launch his 2012 campaign for reelection in Osawatomie, Kansas, he did so precisely because he wanted to emphasize his debts to Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party

it was his persuasive power

captures the heart of democracy

Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal

A growing body of experimental literature has examined the value of interpersonal contact and social networks in generating involvement, focusing particularly on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts in electoral campaigns

One in 10 survey respondents—approximately 100,000 people—indicated interest in using the organizing skills they acquired through their work with OFA to run for public office

Approximately 95 percent of neighborhood team leaders and 75 percent of volunteers in Obama for America (OFA)2 said that they will continue to volunteer in their communities as a result of their involvement in the campaign.

stronger people and stronger communities

volunteers that they were transformed by their experience on the campaign itself

flex their muscles

Right to appeal adverse decisions (laws granting access to courts).

Weber placed his rhetorical weight on the last quality, proportion tempering passion and producing a politics of reason. He prized the carpenterly eye of the master builder, whose patience guides the “strong, slow boring through hard boards,” thereby allowing a cause to be achieved and a structure to be built

These moves presuppose, in effect, a Deweyan, knowledge-able public, capable of self-government when properly informed

His strategy worked in the short run, as union membership shot up to about 35 percent of the labor force in 1954. But in the long run, the economic inefficiencies of a collective bargaining system led to its eventual breakdown; by 2013, unions were down to 6.3 percent of the private labor market. As markets became more global and competitive, monopoly rents shrank

By the efforts of organized labor, Loewe “became a major political issue in the 1912 national election”

Unlike the poor, the rich made a difficult, privileged target. Progressive reformers could pass laws to improve working-class tenements in New York City, but they couldn’t put limits on Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s vast chateau, which took up one whole blockfront along Fifth Avenue.

The paradoxical result is that academia has and continues to produce tens of thousands of would-be democratic “statesmen” without, at the same time, providing the intellectual and moral foundations for an authoritative democratic state.

they find this tilt toward top-down management a subtle betrayal of Progressivism’s historical commitment to democratic exchange

Progressives were emboldened to challenge the structural constraints of the Constitution because they were confident in the new discipline to be provided by science and the objectivity of experts.

They experimented with “direct democracy,” thinking that they might eliminate intermediaries and put power in the hands of the people themselves

It dispelled the notion that the Constitution was a work of timeless truth and that later generations were compelled to defer to the Framers’ ideas

American politics is now polarized around the governing mores of the progressives’ century

The rate of college tuition compared to other consumer goods.

Far more expensive than more obvi-ous signs of status like a watch or bag or car, these investments genu-inely shape life chances and intergenerational mobility.

intersection of the eco-nomic, cultural, and social values of particular classes

The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man

only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female

with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.

their 'pretension' leaves the petit bourgeois particularly disarmed in the less legitimate or not-yet legitimate domains which the cultural 'elite' abandon to them, whether in photography or in cinema

the strategies aimed at transforming the basic disposi­tions of a life-style into a system of aesthetic principles, objective differences into elective distinctions, passive options (constituted exter­nally by the logic of the distinctive relationships) into conscious, elective choices are in fact reserved for members of the dominant class

This claim to aristocracy is less likely to be contested than any other, because the relation of the 'pure', 'disinterested' disposition to the conditions which make it possible, i.e., the material conditions of existence which are rarest because most freed from economic necessity, has every chance of passing unnoticed. The most 'classifying' privilege thus has the privilege of appearing to be the most natural one.

makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it

exclude any 'naive' reaction­horror at the horrible, desire fo r the desirable, pious reverence fo r the sa­cre

can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art

so that a refer­ence to Jan Breughel's Bouquet of Flowers lends dignity to Jean-Michel Pi­cart's Bouquet of Flowers with Parrot, just as, in another context, reference to the latter can, being less common, serve to enhance the fo rmer.

I'd put there what I lack-mountains, vineyards, meadows, goats, cows, sheep, reapers and shepherds

Separated from right and duty, culti­vated and pursued as the highest though�t of the soul and the supreme manifestation of humanity, art or the ideal, stripped of the greater part of itself, reduced ro nothing more than an excitement of fantasy and the senses,

Under the influence of property, the artist, depraved in his reason, dis­solute in his morals, venal and without dignity, is the impure image of ego­ism. The idea of justice and honesty slides over his heart without taking root, and of all the classes of society, the artist class is the poorest in strong souls and noble characters

These two hands unquestionably evoke a poor and unhappy old age'

legitimate works of art

'A photo of a pregnant woman is all right fo r me, not fo r other people',

This 'aesthetic', which subordinates the fo rm and the very existence of the image to its fu nction, is necessarily pluralistic and conditional

the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated ' aesthetic' which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the domi­nant aesthetics

photographed or by the possible use of the photographic image, is being brought into play when manual workers almost invariably reject photog­raphy fo r photography's sake (e.g., the photo of pebbles) as useless, per­verse or bourgeois: 'A waste of film', 'They must have film to throw away', 'I tell you, there are some people who don't know what to do with their time', 'Haven't they got anything better to do with their time than photograph things like that?' 'That's bourgeois photography.'

being less fo rmalized (compare, fo r example, acrobatics with dancing) and less euphemized, they offer more direct, more immediate satisfactions

to the extent that they can be forgotten and do not get in the way of the substance of the work

Alain Locke

hameless borrowing”

“not by simplechronology but by the fact that their members frame the same sorts of questions and try to workthrough them within the same ... horizon or ... problem-space.

A conjuncture is “a fusion of contradictory forces that nevertheless cohereenough to constitute a definite configuration.

oneconsequence of adopting the method of assembly is that it reminds us to avoid “giving [theconjunctural subjects of our inquiries] a sequential form and imaginary unity they neverpossessed

constitutive element in thefabric of the wider world of ideas, movements, and events

A group of uprooted Africans engagedin an act of bricolage: they used what was at hand, both culturally and materially, to cobbletogether the beginnings of an African American culture.

It is 1790, and you are at a seaport in South America

Who can say what will happen to this word "minimalist." Who knows how it will be changed, re-fashioned by the thick patois that is our Southern black tongue. T

The days when only programmers griped about this pattern are long past; Dilbert cartoons hang over executives' desks now.

Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's ``egoless'' programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

But we've examined in this essay an number of ways in which the process of open-source development falsifies the assumptionms behind it—and, empirically, if Brooks's Law were the whole picture Linux would be impossible.

a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

`Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''

I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate.

Each one approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem.

``Debugging is parallelizable''. Although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.

delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity

What made Mathematica’s notebook especially suited to the task was its ability to generate plots, pictures, and beautiful mathematical formulas, and to have this output respond dynamically to changes in the code.

often suppressing the very visual aids that mathematicians use to make their discoveries

the great free-standing wall of Wells Fargo Court (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) -- a surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular? trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite undecidable

Our digression on cartography, however, with its final revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.

These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or "empirically") they really do inhabit a "postindustrial society" from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist -- a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis

not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it

"critical distance."

the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city

The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp

my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel's tripartite scheme

urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes when expressed in commodification

becomes available for more joyous intensities

Bob Perelman

thereby isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material -- or better still, the literal -- signifier in isolation

This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about that past

something which lends the text an extraordinary sense of deja vu and a peculiar familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud's "return of the repressed" in "The Uncanny"

the objects of representation, ostensibly narrative characters, are incommensurable and, as it were, of incomparable substances, like oil and water -- Houdini being a historical figure, Tateh a fictional one, and Coalhouse an intertextual one

This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage

This "death of the subject" in the institution of the star now, however, opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions

the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian) dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts

More interesting, and more problematical, are the ultimate attempts, through this new discourse, to lay siege either to our own present and immediate past or to a more distant history that escapes individual existential memory

what is as unique and unmistakable as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body

In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation

the explosion of modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed

postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.

The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of duree and memory

the end of the psychopathologies of that ego

gap between Earth and World

has not been innocently or randomly chosen

the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic -- the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example -- the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself

architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic

degraded