![]() Or maybe the complaint is that they’re pretending to do it from an objective point of view instead of admitting that they have a liberal bias? I will take this complaint seriously when I meet any person anywhere in the world who is not aware that Vox has a liberal bias. Real Americans personally read all 9,800 pages of Obamacare regulations before forming an opinion on health policy. I think the main complaint is that “explaining the news” is fundamentally condescending. It’s not some sort of giant glowing tribute to national elitism where everyone gathers together and eats arugula and talks about how much they prefer symbolic gestures involving identity to actual systemic change. On the other hand, it’s also not the source of all evil. It didn’t single-handedly reinvent America. It wasn’t the best thing that ever happened. ![]() Hamilton was a pretty good Broadway play. I’m not sure we as a nation deserve The Silmarillion, but a man can dream.īut Harry Potter is at least better than some things (we could have ended out with our national consciousness being shaped by Twilight!), and the point is that comparing your politics to those of a more interesting fantasy world is a natural human urge and probably not indicative of some sort of horrible decay. Probably I would have gone for Lord of the Rings. Harry Potter is not the national mythology I would have chosen. Besides, James Joyce makes for a much less interesting source of political metaphors (“The 2016 election was a lot like Finnegan’s Wake: I have no idea what just happened”) The cultural norm where only kids are allowed to read fantasy guilt-free and everybody else has to read James Joyce is a weird blip in the literary record which is already being corrected. They liked it in medieval Britain, where they would talk about the Knights of the Round Table slaying dragons as they searched for the Holy Grail. They liked it in Classical Greece, where they had stories like Bellerophon riding a flying horse and fighting the Chimera. ![]() “But a children’s book?” Look, guys, fantasy is what the masses actually like. So we stick to what we know – and more important, what we expect everyone else will know too. Well, how many people know who Achitophel is these days? Even Achilles is kind of pushing it. Throughout American history people have compared King George to Pharaoh, Benedict Arnold to Judas, Abraham Lincoln to Moses, et cetera. John Dryden’s famous poem Absalom and Achitophel is a bizarrely complicated analogy of 17th-century English politics to an obscure Biblical story. When King Edward IV took the English throne in 1461, all anybody could talk about was how it reminded them of King Arthur. Herodotus used an extended metaphor between the Persian invasions of his own time and the Trojan War. People Who Compare Political Events To Harry PotterĬomparing politics to your favorite legends is as old as politics and legends. But criticizing celebrities’ activism in general doesn’t seem like a good political strategy.Ģ. By all means criticize tone-deaf celebrities like Lena Dunham who “help” the cause by speaking up in offensive or counterproductive ways. I still think that a celebrity who speaks out about something they think is important is more virtuous than one who doesn’t. Or maybe I’m just being classist and nobody listens to celebrities. And these people are probably the less-educated working-class folks whom the Democrats most need to reach. But judging by the amount of money people will pay celebrities to endorse their products, a lot of people do develop their opinions this way. ![]() Now, maybe you don’t develop your opinions by listening to weird-looking people who seem to be famous for no reason, and maybe you’re proud of that fact. But I guarantee they know who Kim Kardashian is. Unemployed high school dropouts aren’t going to read Paul Krugman editorials, and they might or might not go to Bernie Sanders rallies. If Kim Kardashian wants to help the cause, what do you expect her to do? Write policy white papers? Go door-to-door canvassing? Or would you rather she just stayed silent and didn’t do anything?Īlso, I think the “out-of-touch” critique sort of misses the point. Yes, a Democratic campaign needs to have some substance beyond “look, celebrities!”īut from the celebrities’ own point of view, they’re doing the best they can. Yes, celebrities are often annoying, and almost by definition out-of-touch. No, celebrities are not going to single-handedly change the world. Celebrities Who Speak Out Against Donald Trump Sorry if this is a little snarky and maybe not 100% fair.ġ. I’ll mostly be using Current Affairs articles as foils, not because they’re especially bad, but because they’re especially good and well-written expressions of what many other people are saying. Or “Contra A Convergence Of Lefty and Far-Right Twitter Making Fun Of The Same People”.
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