PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXXI: History, Slavery, & National Narratives

Key Insights:

Nearly all successful political movements over the past 150 years have been strongly nationalistic

A successful cosmopolitanism must therefore be a nationalistic cosmopolitanism—one that says your country is great because it learns from and has important things to teach other nations.

We—somewhat surprisingly—find ourselves endorsing and agreeing with Matthew Desmond’s claim that an important root of some facets of American capitalism is found on the plantation.

We endorse Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton’s calls for reparations,

We enthusiastically and positively give a shout-out to the highly patriotic Nikole Hannah Jones and her contention that the 1619 founding makes African-Americans the most quintessential representatives of the good side of American nationalism

You cannot be a real patriot if you do not care about dealing with your country’s flaws—Carl Shurz: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right!”

Wokeness is 21st century Puritan Protestantism—to build a City Upon a Hill and become a Light Unto the Nations, with a key part of that building composed of our confession that we are the unworthy who must place our hearts on the altar of and tremble before the Almighty .

It is important to mean it: to repent, to take responsibility, to not just say that America owes reparations, but to work to make America pay what it owes.

This podcast appears to be our version of: Three strongly patriotic white guys stand up for ‘Murka!

Hexapodia!

References:

Ed Baptist: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery & the Making of American Capitalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Half_Has_Never_Been_Told/dSrXCwAAQBAJ>

Trevor Burnard: Edward Baptist, Slavery and Capitalism <http://trevorburnard.com/wordpress/?p=30>Matthew Desmond: In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html>

John J. Clegg: Capitalism and Slavery <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683036>

Nikole Hannah Jones: Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html>

P.R. Lockhart & Ed Baptist: How Slavery Became America’s First Big Business <https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-economy-capitalism-violence-cotton-edward-baptist>

Alan L. Olmstead & Paul W. Rhode: Cotton, Slavery, & the New History of Capitalism <https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-economics-studies/olmstead_-_cotton_slavery_and_history_of_new_capitalism_131_nhc_28_sept_2016.pdf>

Ernst Renan: What Is a Nation? <https://web.archive.org/web/20110827065548/http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/e_renan.html>

+, of course:

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe