My first thought with the talk of "extracurricular" activities is that Trump heard somewhere -- the History Channel or something like it -- that during the invasion of Russia, Napoleon was unusually distracted, spending a great deal of time with his Polish mistress, Maria Walewska. On the whole, most accounts agree that Bonaparte by 1812 had aged and gotten used to physical comfort, such that the Napoleon of the older campaigns, who used to just wrap himself up in a great coat sitting in a chair for a few hours each night, was no longer around.
I think this might be what Trump is gesturing at, after having conflated a number of events and compressing the time-scale in his mind ("the night before" doesn't make sense, it was a six months long campaign).
Yes, progressives are feeling fatigue -- which is why I try to concentrate in my own life on local democracy and ecology as opposed to quasi-conspiratorial Russophobia a la' MSNBC et al.
That said, to call Nietzsche a "right-winger", while polemically useful and in a certainly sense intelligible, risks seriously misunderstanding Nietzsche.
While it is obviously true that, post-insanity and after his death, Nietzsche, especially through the work of his Nazi-supporting sister, found widespread support on the European far right; it is also true that Nietzsche spoke to the condition of the revolutionary left, as well (is their not something Nietzschean in V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky?). Habermas rightly calls Nietzsche (along w/ Foucault and I can't remember, someone else) a "Young Turk" (and indeed, Habermas does identify Nietzsche with the right; if that means we can accurately describe Foucault as on the Right, I might take that bargain....). But I think this cuts in a number of ways. The truest Nietzschean in all literature to my mind is Herr Naphtha in Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_. Naphtha is both a revolutionary communist and a fanatical Jesuit -- what does that tell us?
I think flattening Nietzsche into our early 21st c. US political duopoly (what is a "progressive" -- was Pitt the Elder a "progressive"? Machiavelli? Plato?) is a mistake; when really, if you look at Nietzsche's work itself, it is actually a kind history of spirit in the West derived from obsession with classical languages. Does Nietzsche reject the Enlightenment? Yes -- he rejects everything after the rise of Christianity! He attempts to stand outside history and shows it its own face, like Hegel says -- humanity is when Spirit became aware and looked back at itself. He is interested in the transvaluation of all values.
If you want to characterize that in terms of a simple, binary, "left-right" difference, feel free to, but that means you have merely cut an outline of that shape into a piece of cardboard, held it up to your eyes, and gazed through the world at it. It is precisely this blinkered view that helped produce, and in turn is strengthened by, Donald Trump (as to the dispute above, when, as Thomas Frank says, the Democratic Party abandoned workers for the professional bourgeoisie over the last few decades -- that for me is the critical moment. Two parties of Capital, one disingenuous and weak, the other brutal and crazed).
Another factor is translation (a subject I know dear to Prof. Cole). Until Walter Kaufmann's mid-20th c translation of Nietzsche, there were very few quality English versions. For instance, Ubermensch translates not as "Superman" but as "Overman", which is an important difference, and Nietzsche's ideas about self-transcendence resonate with the thought of figures such as Emerson, Kierkegaard, and Sartre -- none of whom I think could fairly be characterized as particularly right-wing.
As an historian, Prof. Cole, you know the riskiness of ahistorical thinking. Philosophy rarely translates in a 1:1 fashion to politics.
All that said, while Nietzsche is wild and actually a very beautiful stylist, in my view Tolstoy, Machiavelli of _The Discourses_ (not "The Prince"), and Rousseau are much more nearly right -- as in both correct and ethical (not necessarily conservative).
Thank you for your work and the opportunity to comment.
I agree with the article's argument as a whole in terms of media misdirection; my quibble is with the idea that heroin doesn't kill in the same way as nicotine, because it certainly does. The lethality of nicotine vs opioids at a molecular level aside, the social costs of both drugs are simply terrible. Here in New England, in Appalachia, in northern Michigan, in the mountain West, because Big Pharma owns the government, legalized heroin (oxycontin, oxycodone, and other opioids) have been pushed on the population en masse for 20 years. There are something like three opiate prescriptions per adult in the State of Utah. As a consequence, nearly a whole generation is being lost in a number of these places, part of the general decline in US life expectancy seen recently. And it's not just overdoses, though people are literally overdosing driving down the street in my town on a regular basis; it's the associated breakdown in personal and communal health that comes alongside a society dealing with a crisis of this level (AIDS in the 90s is the only equivalent in our recent history; see also the breakup of the USSR).
This is some of the human and social wreckage of the bipartisan economic policies of the last 40 years that have led the country to this pass. Indeed, the same strategies of corporate malevolence underlie much of the general crisis of our ecosphere.
Yet I'm cautiously hopeful, as there is little other choice but to fight. Even if the economic conditions are not changing here, or are even getting worse, people are beginning to talk about this substance abuse and mental health problem that is claiming our people young and old, and I will take small but significant victories such as that at times like this.
My first thought with the talk of "extracurricular" activities is that Trump heard somewhere -- the History Channel or something like it -- that during the invasion of Russia, Napoleon was unusually distracted, spending a great deal of time with his Polish mistress, Maria Walewska. On the whole, most accounts agree that Bonaparte by 1812 had aged and gotten used to physical comfort, such that the Napoleon of the older campaigns, who used to just wrap himself up in a great coat sitting in a chair for a few hours each night, was no longer around.
I think this might be what Trump is gesturing at, after having conflated a number of events and compressing the time-scale in his mind ("the night before" doesn't make sense, it was a six months long campaign).
Yes, progressives are feeling fatigue -- which is why I try to concentrate in my own life on local democracy and ecology as opposed to quasi-conspiratorial Russophobia a la' MSNBC et al.
That said, to call Nietzsche a "right-winger", while polemically useful and in a certainly sense intelligible, risks seriously misunderstanding Nietzsche.
While it is obviously true that, post-insanity and after his death, Nietzsche, especially through the work of his Nazi-supporting sister, found widespread support on the European far right; it is also true that Nietzsche spoke to the condition of the revolutionary left, as well (is their not something Nietzschean in V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky?). Habermas rightly calls Nietzsche (along w/ Foucault and I can't remember, someone else) a "Young Turk" (and indeed, Habermas does identify Nietzsche with the right; if that means we can accurately describe Foucault as on the Right, I might take that bargain....). But I think this cuts in a number of ways. The truest Nietzschean in all literature to my mind is Herr Naphtha in Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_. Naphtha is both a revolutionary communist and a fanatical Jesuit -- what does that tell us?
I think flattening Nietzsche into our early 21st c. US political duopoly (what is a "progressive" -- was Pitt the Elder a "progressive"? Machiavelli? Plato?) is a mistake; when really, if you look at Nietzsche's work itself, it is actually a kind history of spirit in the West derived from obsession with classical languages. Does Nietzsche reject the Enlightenment? Yes -- he rejects everything after the rise of Christianity! He attempts to stand outside history and shows it its own face, like Hegel says -- humanity is when Spirit became aware and looked back at itself. He is interested in the transvaluation of all values.
If you want to characterize that in terms of a simple, binary, "left-right" difference, feel free to, but that means you have merely cut an outline of that shape into a piece of cardboard, held it up to your eyes, and gazed through the world at it. It is precisely this blinkered view that helped produce, and in turn is strengthened by, Donald Trump (as to the dispute above, when, as Thomas Frank says, the Democratic Party abandoned workers for the professional bourgeoisie over the last few decades -- that for me is the critical moment. Two parties of Capital, one disingenuous and weak, the other brutal and crazed).
Another factor is translation (a subject I know dear to Prof. Cole). Until Walter Kaufmann's mid-20th c translation of Nietzsche, there were very few quality English versions. For instance, Ubermensch translates not as "Superman" but as "Overman", which is an important difference, and Nietzsche's ideas about self-transcendence resonate with the thought of figures such as Emerson, Kierkegaard, and Sartre -- none of whom I think could fairly be characterized as particularly right-wing.
As an historian, Prof. Cole, you know the riskiness of ahistorical thinking. Philosophy rarely translates in a 1:1 fashion to politics.
All that said, while Nietzsche is wild and actually a very beautiful stylist, in my view Tolstoy, Machiavelli of _The Discourses_ (not "The Prince"), and Rousseau are much more nearly right -- as in both correct and ethical (not necessarily conservative).
Thank you for your work and the opportunity to comment.
I agree with the article's argument as a whole in terms of media misdirection; my quibble is with the idea that heroin doesn't kill in the same way as nicotine, because it certainly does. The lethality of nicotine vs opioids at a molecular level aside, the social costs of both drugs are simply terrible. Here in New England, in Appalachia, in northern Michigan, in the mountain West, because Big Pharma owns the government, legalized heroin (oxycontin, oxycodone, and other opioids) have been pushed on the population en masse for 20 years. There are something like three opiate prescriptions per adult in the State of Utah. As a consequence, nearly a whole generation is being lost in a number of these places, part of the general decline in US life expectancy seen recently. And it's not just overdoses, though people are literally overdosing driving down the street in my town on a regular basis; it's the associated breakdown in personal and communal health that comes alongside a society dealing with a crisis of this level (AIDS in the 90s is the only equivalent in our recent history; see also the breakup of the USSR).
This is some of the human and social wreckage of the bipartisan economic policies of the last 40 years that have led the country to this pass. Indeed, the same strategies of corporate malevolence underlie much of the general crisis of our ecosphere.
Yet I'm cautiously hopeful, as there is little other choice but to fight. Even if the economic conditions are not changing here, or are even getting worse, people are beginning to talk about this substance abuse and mental health problem that is claiming our people young and old, and I will take small but significant victories such as that at times like this.