Category: History, Page 26
George Babbitt, Main Street and the Origins of the Culture War
Occidental Dissent - Sep 29th 2020 5:34pm EDTIn the 1910s, Modernism arrived in America. In the 1920s, the culture war began between Moderns in the cities who repudiated traditional religious and moral values in favor of self-expression and cultural liberation and Victorians in the small towns and countryside who clung to them. Prohibition was the first big flash point in the culture […]
The Triumph of Antiracism
Occidental Dissent - Sep 28th 2020 4:48pm EDTHow did racial science fall out of fashion in America? What led to the triumph of “antiracism” in the 1930s and 1940s? The following excerpt comes from Philip A. Klinker and Rogers M. Smith’s book The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America: “That shock led to an intellectual battle in […]
The Young Intellectuals and Nietzsche
Occidental Dissent - Sep 28th 2020 10:54am EDTI’ve been getting some pushback against my argument that Friedrich Nietzsche had a major formative impact on the people who created modern American liberalism. The hallmark of modern liberalism is social liberalism or cultural liberalism. It is left-libertarian. It is driven by the transgressive impulse to tear down cultural norms. It is an aesthetic form […]
The Lost Generation and Modernism
Occidental Dissent - Sep 27th 2020 5:27pm EDTI finally watched the whole documentary. In the 1910s, there were only a few Moderns in the United States who were living what at the time were eccentric lifestyles in a few bohemian enclaves in Chicago and New York City. The catastrophe that was World War I which sent 2 million American soldiers to France […]
Randolph Bourne, Modernism and The New Woman
Occidental Dissent - Sep 26th 2020 3:05pm EDTThe “New Woman” of Modern America rejected what it meant to be a woman in Victorian America. In the 19th century, women were either respectable and devoted to their families or were whores and prostitutes. The overwhelming majority of women got married and chose to live a respectable life. The Victorians thought that women were […]
Hidden Hands: The CIA, Modernism and the Cold War
Occidental Dissent - Sep 25th 2020 8:06pm EDTDuring the Cold War, the CIA used jazz, rock and abstract expressionism as weapons to subvert and degenerate the culture of the Eastern Bloc and to promote liberalism and free-market capitalism. Michael Jackson’s music was banned as degenerate art in the Soviet Union. If you look deep into the history of the avant-garde, the neocons […]
This Side of Paradise
Occidental Dissent - Sep 25th 2020 12:38pm EDTVictorian America ended in the catastrophe that was World War I. 2 million American soldiers had fought in France. 130,000 of them never came home. The Wilson administration imposed a suffocating conformism on the country which exceeded anything in American history before or since. We have already seen how The Masses was shutdown and anarchists […]
The Modernism Debate
Occidental Dissent - Sep 24th 2020 1:24pm EDT.@TheCptBlackPill and I debate “Modernism.” https://t.co/7jwZnMXH4p— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) September 24, 2020 Where does modern liberalism come from? In my view, the hallmark of modern liberalism is cultural liberalism, which distinguishes the liberalism of Modern America from the liberalism of Victorian America. The former is primarily an aesthetic form of liberalism. The latter was […]
The Revolt Against The Masses
Occidental Dissent - Sep 23rd 2020 3:48pm EDTIt was reading Eric P. Kaufmann’s excellent book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America that drew my attention to Modernism. I’m currently reading through his sources. As I became curious about the link between Modernism, cultural liberalism and American racial and culture decline, I discovered that Fred Siegel had already written a book about this […]
The Cosmopolitan Ideal
Occidental Dissent - Sep 23rd 2020 1:02pm EDTIn recent weeks, I have been writing about the 1910s and trying to give you a sense of what Victorian America looked like on the eve of the cultural revolution. It was a White, Anglo-Saxon (in culture), Protestant nation that also happened to be liberal and republican in principles. In our own times, we are […]
The Retreat of Racial Science
Occidental Dissent - Sep 22nd 2020 7:30pm EDTAt the beginning of the 20th century, America was still in the Victorian era. American identity was White, Anglo-Saxon (in culture), Protestant and liberal and republican in principles. There was an overwhelming national consensus in support of progress, traditional moral values and the Anglo-American literary canon. The dominant aesthetic was New England and Appalachian Regionalism. […]
Moderns vs. Victorians
Occidental Dissent - Sep 21st 2020 5:21pm EDTI’ve already covered a lot of important ground. Modernism arrived in the United States in the 1910s in Chicago and New York City. The Armory Show of 1913 introduced America to Modern art. It began with the establishment of small bohemian enclaves of avant-garde artists and poets in Chicago and New York City which flowered […]
The Lost Generation, Jazz and Deracination
Occidental Dissent - Sep 20th 2020 11:15pm EDTI’m continuing to investigate cosmopolitanism, deracination and how both are connected to the growth of Modernism in 1910s and 1920s America. Why would White Americans repudiate their own ethnic identity? White jazz musicians, the expatriate writers of the Lost Generation who moved to Paris and bohemian artists who lived in enclaves like Greenwich Village in […]
Review: The Intellectuals and the Masses
Occidental Dissent - Sep 20th 2020 9:37pm EDT
The Rise of Modernism
Occidental Dissent - Sep 17th 2020 5:27pm EDTI’ve been skipping all around the world. In this article, I will try to sum up the case that I have made so far and where I am going with this argument, which is that the rise of Modernism is central to understanding our decline. In his book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric […]
Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells, Modernism and the Future
Occidental Dissent - Sep 16th 2020 3:35pm EDTThe Young Intellectuals created modern liberalism. Who was the biggest influence on the Young Intellectuals though? H.G. Wells wrote over 100 novels, sold millions of copies and was the most influential author in the English language of the early 20th century. Along with Jules Verne, Wells was the father of modern science fiction. He was […]
Review: The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917
Occidental Dissent - Sep 15th 2020 1:12pm EDT
The New Woman
Occidental Dissent - Sep 15th 2020 1:14am EDTThis is interesting. The New Woman arrived in the United States from Western Europe in the 1910s. The American version became known as the Flapper. “The New Woman was the term used at the end of the nineteenth century to describe women who were pushing against the limits which society imposed on women. Today she might […]
The Young Intellectuals
Occidental Dissent - Sep 13th 2020 8:53pm EDT
H.L. Mencken, Nietzsche and the Death of the Victorian Mainstream
Occidental Dissent - Sep 12th 2020 9:55am EDTWhy should anyone bother studying this? What relevance does it have to our own times? I would respond by saying it is worth knowing when, why and how our own age began and when, why and how the old mainstream crumbled. The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The End of American Innocence, […]
The Roots of Cultural Liberalism
Occidental Dissent - Sep 10th 2020 10:53pm EDTThe is a pretty good summary. I’ve never seen post-liberals, reactionaries or White Nationalists bring up the true origins of cultural liberalism. The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917: “It was not the fervent romanticism of an earlier period, though it drew on the romanticism of all […]
The Meaning of Progress
Occidental Dissent - Sep 10th 2020 12:39am EDTWhat is the meaning of progress? According to Henry F. May, the Victorian mainstream believed in the old credo of moralism, progress and culture. The Progressive movement, however, did not define progress as social liberalism. The mainstream of the Progressive movement was left-conservative, not left-liberal. The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The […]
Pride and Prejudice Fails To Meet Modern Inclusion Standards
Occidental Dissent - Sep 9th 2020 1:59pm EDTStarting in 2024, movies will need to meet specific inclusion standards in order to be eligible for the best picture Oscar. https://t.co/aPT1qejKvU— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 9, 2020 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is responsible for the annual Academy Awards, has implemented sweeping new restrictions and requirements that will determine […]
Custodians of Culture
Occidental Dissent - Sep 8th 2020 11:12pm EDTThis was America in 1912. It was the year the RMS Titanic sank. The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917: “The third article of the standard American credo, the belief in culture, was weaker than the other two. We can think of the three as a triptych, […]
Rod Dreher’s Weirdness
Occidental Dissent - Sep 8th 2020 6:19pm EDTRod Dreher is a strange man. TAC: “Now, what I found most interesting in Ehrett’s review, and definitely something I want to think about, is his argument that Christianity is really going to be a bystander in the coming clash between Progressivism and Atavism. You really need to read his review discussion of the idea, […]
