Category: History, Page 29
America Is Having a Moral Convulsion
Occidental Dissent - Oct 6th 2020 3:33pm EDTDavid Brooks has a long new think piece at The Atlantic in which he tries to explain the social breakdown that we are witnessing: The Atlantic: “American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every […]
The Rise of Hollywood
Occidental Dissent - Oct 5th 2020 9:55am EDTEditor’s Note: This is a work in progress. When did our age begin? What distinguishes Modern America from Victorian America? The transition between the two began in the 1910s, World War I was the rupture and was complete by the Roaring Twenties. The Lost Generation was the first Modern generation. On one side of this […]
Victorian Racial Attitudes
Occidental Dissent - Oct 4th 2020 6:56pm EDTVictorian racial attitudes prevailed in White America until the 1920s and remained dominant well into Modern America when World War II transformed American racial attitudes. The following excerpt comes from Stanley Coben’s book Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America: “Victorianism in the United States was basically the culture of an […]
Franz Boas, Antiracism and the Rockefeller Foundation
Occidental Dissent - Oct 4th 2020 5:23pm EDTIn the 1910s, Big Philanthropy came into existence. The Rockefeller Foundation was founded in 1913. In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation threw its largesse behind the recently founded Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which financed the work of Franz Boas and his students like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. The Rockefeller Foundation: “Charles Merriam, President […]
The Sun Also Rises
Occidental Dissent - Oct 3rd 2020 2:32pm EDTIn the 1920s, Franz Boas and his students in the social sciences challenged traditional Victorian beliefs and values in race, sexuality and gender roles in favor of cultural egalitarianism. Meanwhile in the arts and literature, Modernist poets, critics and novelists simultaneously challenged Victorian beliefs and values in manners, morals, beauty, sexuality and gender roles in […]
Antiracism, Social Science and the Revolt Against Victorian America
Occidental Dissent - Oct 3rd 2020 12:40pm EDTIn the 1910s, Modernism arrived in America. The first Modernists established enclaves in Chicago and Greenwich Village in New York City. Most of the Chicago group ended up moving to Greenwich Village in the years before World War I. In America’s first truly bohemian enclave, anarchists and socialists mixed with progressive liberals and the Modernist […]
Victorian America
Occidental Dissent - Oct 2nd 2020 2:23pm EDTIn order to better understand the values and beliefs of Modern America, the culture of 20th century America, lets take a look back at its predecessor, Victorian America. Towards a Definition of American Modernism: “To locate the inner dynamics of Modernism and to see how it came into being, it is necessary to return briefly […]
The Second Klan and Modernism
Occidental Dissent - Oct 2nd 2020 10:44am EDTIn the 1920s, the Second Klan was on the other side of the culture war between Victorians and Moderns that I have been describing in recent weeks. In fact, the rise of the Second Klan was more about national identity and this cultural and moral breakdown than it was about race. The Second Klan appealed […]
Towards a Definition of American Modernism
Occidental Dissent - Oct 1st 2020 5:07pm EDTThis is an excellent article. It lays out how the Victorian culture of the 19th century had divided the world into sharp hierarchies and spheres – in race, sex, class, gender roles, civilization – and how the Modernist culture of the 20th century violently reacted against its predecessor and set about dismantling all of those […]
From Babbitt To Bateman: The Bohemian Origins of Consumer Capitalism
Occidental Dissent - Sep 30th 2020 10:39am EDTThe Victorians had prized religion and morality and an ethic of self-denial, thrift and industry. They also restrained sexuality. The Moderns rejected all of this as bourgeois, repressive and philistine. They wanted to live their lives in the moment and devoted to the religion of art and experience. If you lived a bourgeois life like […]
The Greenwich Village Idea
Occidental Dissent - Sep 30th 2020 2:37am EDTWhat is Modernism? Why are we spending so much time on this? Who were the Moderns? Who were the Victorians? What was the nature of this culture war that broke out in America in the late 1910s and early 1920s? How did it lead to the creation of our world? The following excerpt comes from […]
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
