The Rise of Politiphobia: Once to Every Man and Establishment

(srouce) James Russell Lowell, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right / engraved by J.A.J. Wilcox, from the original crayon in the possession of Charles Eliot Norton, drawn by S.W. Rowse in 1855

(source)

Just read a great article in The Atlantic that cuts the heart of Establishment thinking right now.

It's called "How American Politics Went Insane" by Jonathan Rauch. Very anti-Trump of course. The author decries the current "anti-establishment nihilism" of "politiphobes," whom he defines as Americans who display a bigoted hatred of politicians. They are ruining American government, and by extension, American society.

There's some really good stuff in the article. I liked how he talked about the "informal constitution" which he asserts is the real governing document of America (mostly for the good), and how the arrangement is endangered by the current "insanity."

In this paragraph, the author comes close to hitting on some core features of the Establishment [emphasis mine]:

The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen, because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called “assembling power in the formal government."

Historically, the Establishment was based on the idea that there is definitely such a thing as too much democracy. Furthermore the danger of having too much democracy would only increase over time as society modernized, and became more open. World War II, and its aftermath, was seen as providing the proof that having too much democracy could actually destroy the world.

During the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the expansion of the informal constitution was portrayed successfully as a democratizing influence, partly because there were so many new federal government jobs available for people of many diverse backgrounds. Moreover the new powers acquired by federal bureaucracies to intervene in American society in unprecedented ways were viewed broadly by the middle and lower classes as benefiting them. 

The golden age of the Establishment was during the post World War II era when both the elite and much of the American people could view the expansion of the federal government as serving their interests. Not surprisingly this was the era when there was bipartisan cooperation of the expansion of government up through the Nixon Administration, which ended in 1974.




2016 "How American Politics Went Insane" by Jonathan Rauch. "Rauch is an American author, journalist and activist. After graduating from Yale University, Rauch worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, for the National Journal magazine, and later for The Economist magazine and as a freelance writer. He has in the past described himself as "an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual."'

"Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.

2014 "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Hehisi Coates, published in The Atlantic. 

"Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft."

2010 The Atlantic posts its first profit in a decade. The New York Times noted the accomplishment was the result of "a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue."

2008 TheAtlantic.com drops its subscriber wall.

2006 James Bennett becomes editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. "James Bennet was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and was editor-in-chief of The New Journal. Bennet was due to become the Times''s Beijing correspondent in late 2006. He resigned from the paper in March of that year to accept an offer to become the 14th editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Bennet was selected by the magazine's publisher, David G. Bradley, following an exhaustive selection process. Bradley conferred with 80 journalists around the United States."

2005 George F. Kennan (b. 1904) dies in Princeton.

2005 Ownership group of The Atlantic announces move of the magazine to Washington, D.C. " the publishers announced that the editorial offices would be moved from its long-time home at 77 North Washington Street in Boston to join the company's advertising and circulation divisions in Washington, D.C.  Later in August, Bradley told the New York Observer, cost cutting from the move would amount to a minor $200,000–$300,000 and those savings would be swallowed by severance-related spending. The reason was to create a hub in Washington where the top minds from all of Bradley's publications could collaborate under the Atlantic Media Company umbrella. Few of the Boston staff agreed to relocate, and Bradley embarked on an open search for a new editorial staff"

2003 "Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group" by Jonathan Rauch published in The Atlantic Monthly.

2003 Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America by Jonathan Rauch.
 
1999 Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working by Jonathan Rauch
 
1999 (Sept.) Mortimer Zuckerman transferred ownership of The Atlantic to David G. Bradley, owner of the Beltway news-focused National Journal Group. Bradley had promised that the magazine would stay in Boston for the foreseeable future, as it did for the next five and a half years.

1994 Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government by Jonathan Rauch.

1989 "The Last Wise Man: An introduction to the diaries of George F. Kennan" published in The Atlantic Monthly.  "(Editorial) We derive the title of this month’s cover article from Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's book, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, about Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan, whom it calls the "architects of the American century." Two of these men are still living, and one of them, Kennan, is still highly visible in public life-especially, in recent years, in his passionate opposition to the nuclear-arms race."

1982 "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety" by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, published in The Atlantic Monthly.

1980 The Atlantic Monthly acquired by Mortimer Zuckerman, property magnate and founder of Boston Properties, who became its Chairman.

1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Hr. published in The Atlantic Monthly.

1945 "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush published in The Atlantic Monthly. "described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945—before and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion."

1880 James Russell Lowell appointed Minister to England. "He was granted a salary of $17,500 with about $3,500 for expenses. While serving in this capacity, he addressed an importation of allegedly diseased cattle and made recommendations that predated the Pure Food and Drug Act. Queen Victoria commented that she had never seen an ambassador who "created so much interest and won so much regard as Mr. Lowell." Lowell held this role until the close of Chester A. Arthur's presidency in the spring of 1885, despite his wife's failing health. Lowell was already well known in England for his writing and, during his time there, he befriended fellow author Henry James, who referred to him as "conspicuously American." Lowell also befriended Leslie Stephen many years earlier and became the godfather to his daughter, future writer Virginia Woolf. Lowell was popular enough that he was offered a professorship at Oxford after his recall by president Grover Cleveland, though the offer was declined

1877 James Russell Lowell appointed Ambassador to Spain.

1876 James Russell Lowell serves as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, speaking on behalf of presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes.

1869 "The New Education" by Charles W. Eliot published in The Atlantic Monthly.

1866 "The Freedman's Story" by William Parker published in The Atlantic Monthly.

1862 "Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe published in The Atlantic Monthly.

1861 Lowell steps down as editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly.

1860 The term "Boston Brahmin" is coined in an article in The Atlantic Monthly. by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

1858 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the first of Breakfast-Table" series.

1857 The Atlantic Monthly founded in Boston, with James Russell Lowell as the first editor. First issue published Nov. 1. "The magazine's initiator and founder was Francis H. Underwood, an assistant to the publisher, who received less recognition than his partners because he was "neither a 'humbug' nor a Harvard man". The other founding sponsors were prominent writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Harriet Beecher Stowe; John Greenleaf Whittier; and James Russell Lowell, who served as its first editor. With its first issue in November of that year, Lowell e at once gave the magazine the stamp of high literature and of bold speech on public affairs

1854 Lowell accepts professorship at Harvard.

1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

1848 A Fable for Critics, by James Russell Lowell. " It was published anonymously, a book-length poem satirizing contemporary critics and poets. It proved popular, and the first three thousand copies sold out quickly. In it, Lowell took good-natured jabs at his contemporary poets and critics. Not all the subjects included were pleased, however. Edgar Allan Poe, who had been referred to as part genius and "two-fifths sheer fudge," reviewed the work in the Southern Literary Messenger and called it "'loose'—ill-conceived and feebly executed, as well in detail as in general. ... we confess some surprise at his putting forth so unpolished a performance."

1845 "The Present Crisis", by James Russell Lowell. "It addressed the national crisis over slavery leading up to the Civil War, has had an impact in the modern civil rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People named its newsletter The Crisis after the poem, and Martin Luther King, Jr. frequently quoted the poem in his speeches and sermons. The poem was also the source of the hymn Once to Every Man and Nation."

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

1844 James Russell Lowell marries Maria White. "He and his wife had several children, though only one survived past childhood. The couple soon became involved in the movement to abolish slavery, with Lowell using poetry to express his anti-slavery views and taking a job in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. After moving back to Cambridge, Lowell was one of the founders of a journal called The Pioneer, which lasted only three issues."

1841 James Russell Lowell publishes his first collection of poetry.


1838 James Russell Lowell graduates from Harvard College.  Becomes friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

1819 James Russell Lowell born "the son of the Reverend Charles Russell Lowell, Sr. (1782–1861), a minister at a Unitarian church in Boston, who had previously studied theology at Edinburgh, and Harriett Brackett Spence Lowell. By the time James Russell Lowell was born, the family owned a large estate in Cambridge called Elmwood.

1782 John Lowell, grandfather of James Russell Lowell, iss elected to represent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a Delegate to the Third Congress of the Confederation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1639 The Lowell family settles in Cape Ann after arriving in Boston. "The patriarch, Percival Lowle (1571–1665), described as a "solid citizen of Bristol", determined at the age of 68 that the future was in the New World. By the 19th and 20th centuries, the Lowells descended from John Lowell (1743–1802) were widely considered to be one of America's most accomplished families."

1636 Harvard College founded.