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this is an interesting moment for the periodic meta-discussion to happen.
tfp is as a whole is shaped by the bush administration, which was around longer than the community.
political debates have been shaped by the way the administration framed itself and the world---for it or against it, cheerleading or digusted, it was the dominant frame of reference, not only in shaping what was discussed but also (perhaps more importantly) how discussions happened.
when i started playing here in 2004, the population that would float about in political debates was very different than it is now---there were different approaches amongst conservatives, some more concerned with realpolitik, some with economic liberalism, others systematically right libertarian, and yet others who generated the appearance of only repeating the line of the moment. against them you would find a range of perspectives--but the debates ended up having a similar shape to them, even then.
over time, the population has changed...
but there has been a consistency to how debates happen and i don't think gender is an explanatory aspect of this.
thinking back on it, i see this as a function of the dominant political/ideological climate---from my viewpoint, populist conservatism was about identity.
centering political arguments on a sense of who you *are* rather than on what you think about x or y obviously blurs out the distinction self/argument.
a second feature of the frame that was dominant for most of the lifespan of tfp as a whole has been the tendency to collapse political argument into statements about things, which are understood as having essences. capitalist cycles and crises and routine abuses/contradictions are like the weather. like it or not, it's inevitable because, well, it's Nature. good/evil, elite/the Volk, us/them, us/terrorist, america/other...simple-minded binaries that function to exacerbate differences and reduce them to matters of essence at the same time.
with the end of the bush period and the large-scale situations which have enframed it, this old populist conservative ideology is coming apart. i think the election cycle--endless and stupid tho it was--served to keep the corpse of it animated as the dominant ideological frame--and because dominant, the necessary referencepoints of claims and arguments about them.
but that's ending now. all of it is dissolving.
in the microcosm of tfp, this is an interesting moment because, if we choose to do it, we can remake how we interact across questions political. i think it will happen anyway, but there is the option of taking control of it and trying to make things otherwise than they have been. which would mean, in a sense, breaking with the history of the community itself and launching an experiment in making something else--because what shapes and reinforces habit does not have to be big, it just has to be integrated into a routine.
speaking for myself, i welcome the change.
i have found and still find the language of populist conservatism to be dangerous in its structure and problematic at the level of contents--between the two, the first has been mostly what i've been thinking about in the context of debates here. i've found it difficult to take conservative arguments seriously because so many reproduce the language of populist conservatism and seem to require it---it's been difficult to get folk to step back from it, and i'm far more interested in why folk think as they do than anything else.
and i'm pretty sure that my personal sense of being stranded in a version of the united states that i did not recognize, of moving through a system indulging a long flirtation with a kind of war-hysteria that was like the theater of what'd happen if the front national got power in france, did not help my attitude. and the sense that there was nothing to be done about it in reality i am sure contributed a bit of extra vigor to debates here.
i have other stuff to say, but i'll leave it here for the time being.
i think we're in an interesting position at an interesting moment.
i think we should take advantage of it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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