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Ivan Ermakoff, Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications: Studies two parliaments that surrendered authority to a dictator—Munich in 1933 and Vichy in 1940. Ermakoff suggests that they did so in both instances because, despite party structures (and despite the fact that in Munich, party members talked only to each other whereas the French were very cross-connected), very few clearly stood up for anti-dictator commitments, so people didn’t think the anti-dictator commitments were widely shared. In Munich, the act of delegating constitutional powers to Hitler made his actions “legal,” which legitimized Nazis and undermined mobilization against them. Political legitimacy encouraged even proponents of democracy to accept the outcome, which also happened in Vichy.
Vichy: “With the exception of the small clique that actively pushed for passage of the bill, the great majority of those who voted for the power transfer did not want a regime politically aligned with Nazi Germany. The crucial factor underlying the collective abdication of the French National Assembly on 10 July 1940 was not threats, blindness, or ideological propensities but the dynamic of expectation formation that took shape among parliamentarians in Vichy. French parliamentarians endorsed the power transfer when they realized that no one would oppose it. They rationalized their decision by portraying it as the only viable and acceptable course of action.”
In a warning to support AOC and not Newsom, he concludes: “the signals provided by prominent actors through their public behaviors were the key to consensus formation and political alignment.” At its core, uncertainty “undermined their resolution and motivated their wait-and-see stance.” This uncertainty and lack of public rallying points meant that “actors who by profession were trained to assess opportunities and threats came to believe that the challenger would be nice enough to restrain himself and not abuse the resources of his power.”
They engaged in both voluntary blindness and wishful thinking, and it mattered that they did so together—they encouraged each other. It’s true that groups can talk themselves into extremism—but it turns out they can also talk themselves into acquiescence.
James Tejani, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America: Overwritten account of the land that eventually (after the book’s end) became the port, focusing on the maneuvers that various people engaged in to control/own the land, including a family whose claims stemmed from Mexican titles and the Standard Pacific railroad. If you want a lot of details about settler colonialism at work, this provides an example.
Henry Jenkins, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America: Evaluating both popular children’s books and advice to parents, Jenkins chronicles the rise of parenting techniques that were stereotyped as “permissive,” though neither primary intellectual voice—Benjamin Spock and Margaret Mead—characterized their description/advocacy that way; they definitely didn’t think that “anything goes.”
Jenkins characterizes permissiveness as having multiple features: it requires sustained, empathetic engagement with children to understand their reactions; it values “children’s sensuality, pleasure, curiosity, and passion as motivating them to explore their environment,” upholds “the rights of children to find their own voices, articulate their own sense of justice, and participate in democratic processes within their families and schools,” encourages the creation of expression—pictures, play, song, or otherwise— “as a means of working through intense, sometimes overwhelming emotions,” and prioritizes explanations and discussions rather than orders or dictated truth. Its advocates “mostly saw themselves as progressive, trying to change the structure and goals of the American family and pave the way for larger changes in the national culture. They wanted to raise children who would be more open to diversity, more willing to embrace democratic citizenship, better prepared to deal with a rapidly changing world, more capable of embracing global brotherhood, and more comfortable with their own bodies.”
This permissive mindset was deracialized and tried to avoid conscious racial stereotypes, but, in doing so, “1950s and 1960s children’s fictions also stepped away from representing people of color, complicit in segregation regardless of their liberal self-perceptions.” Black parents faced particular risks raising their children, especially boys, according to Dr. Spock, whose encouragement of exploration could easily be read by authorities as defiance. This made permissiveness “a form of white privilege, no matter how much these authors might have wished otherwise.”
Child-rearing advocates directly engaged with children’s media-makers, and Jenkins mines the latter’s texts to tell us “about adults, their values, their aspirations, their emotional needs,” rather than about children’s actual experiences. Although they’ve been criticized as predecessors of today’s intensive parenting, which weighs heavily on women, many of those trying to reform parenting were women’s rights activists trying to reason from their own direct observations of children rather than abstract theorizing. These “permissive writers reconceptualized fatherhood, shifting attention from fathers’ traditional functions as breadwinner and disciplinarian toward a new role as playmate.” Weary fathers could get renewed by playing with their sons, while modeling masculinity to them. Play was “an escape from social control, as a space of the free imagination,” but also an entry point for leisure- and consumption-oriented consumerism. And permissiveness also “allowed adults to rethink their domestic lives as helping to construct a more democratic society, and through the representation of the child as a ‘wild thing,’ to imagine the possibilities for their own escape from constrained roles.” But that also meant that fathers retreated from the world with their sons, rather than teaching them how to be adults.
Dennis the Menace was an example of the brand of conservatism that celebrated “an irrepressible masculine spirit” and “boyhood as a force of opposition.” Jenkins contrasts Dennis to the immigrant “real” menaces of the 20s, the Katzenjammer kids—I wonder what he’d say about The Great Brain books of the late 60s/70s and similar books. (Looking those books up, I found out they were edited by E.L. Doctorow. The more you know!) In fact, Dennis is a national metaphor: “America was trying to mask its newly discovered geopolitical influence and its intrusions into other nations’ sovereignty behind a different myth of childlike innocence.” Sure, it did bad things, but it was good at heart.
Like sf, children’s stories used metaphor instead of actual Black characters. I loved Jenkins’ discussion of Dumbo. He points out that, although the black crows living on the outskirts of town are painfully stereotypical, they also (like the “magical Negro” trope) enable Dumbo’s success: “Their acceptance of the misfit pachyderm gives him the courage to gain acceptance by the circus society. … Such stories show how the culture spoke about the need to accept and even celebrate difference without naming any specific form of difference. We can’t say Dumbo is queer, disabled, or Black, though his story might have addressed each of these issues for specific viewers.”
Mr. Rogers modeled permissive ideals for decades longer than other prominent promoters, even after permissiveness lost its dominance, “which is why Rogers, today, is seen as a unique rather than representative figure—in some ways, a man out of his time.” By the late 60s/early 70s, permissiveness was controversial to new people, and Black parents and advice-givers in particular had to grapple with it. “While parenting books by white writers generally focus on psychology, these authors turned to sociological perspectives. They could not consider how to raise ‘normal’ Black children without asking core questions about the society where they were coming of age.” Things like feeding on demand, “an early breakthrough for permissive parenting,” had more tradeoffs for working mothers, and a fixed schedule could help children learn patience, since Black children needed to be prepared for hardship and constraint as well as for rights assertion in the face of discrimination.
I learned that Jonny Quest had a South Asian sidekick so the author could get a “child of the streets” but not “the typical black kid from the ghetto which so many others had used in comic strips and comic books at the time.” As Jenkins puts it, “casting Hadji was about displacing Blackness, shifting from a civil rights frame to a global-brotherhood one, which somehow felt less stereotypical.”
Vichy: “With the exception of the small clique that actively pushed for passage of the bill, the great majority of those who voted for the power transfer did not want a regime politically aligned with Nazi Germany. The crucial factor underlying the collective abdication of the French National Assembly on 10 July 1940 was not threats, blindness, or ideological propensities but the dynamic of expectation formation that took shape among parliamentarians in Vichy. French parliamentarians endorsed the power transfer when they realized that no one would oppose it. They rationalized their decision by portraying it as the only viable and acceptable course of action.”
In a warning to support AOC and not Newsom, he concludes: “the signals provided by prominent actors through their public behaviors were the key to consensus formation and political alignment.” At its core, uncertainty “undermined their resolution and motivated their wait-and-see stance.” This uncertainty and lack of public rallying points meant that “actors who by profession were trained to assess opportunities and threats came to believe that the challenger would be nice enough to restrain himself and not abuse the resources of his power.”
They engaged in both voluntary blindness and wishful thinking, and it mattered that they did so together—they encouraged each other. It’s true that groups can talk themselves into extremism—but it turns out they can also talk themselves into acquiescence.
James Tejani, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America: Overwritten account of the land that eventually (after the book’s end) became the port, focusing on the maneuvers that various people engaged in to control/own the land, including a family whose claims stemmed from Mexican titles and the Standard Pacific railroad. If you want a lot of details about settler colonialism at work, this provides an example.
Henry Jenkins, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America: Evaluating both popular children’s books and advice to parents, Jenkins chronicles the rise of parenting techniques that were stereotyped as “permissive,” though neither primary intellectual voice—Benjamin Spock and Margaret Mead—characterized their description/advocacy that way; they definitely didn’t think that “anything goes.”
Jenkins characterizes permissiveness as having multiple features: it requires sustained, empathetic engagement with children to understand their reactions; it values “children’s sensuality, pleasure, curiosity, and passion as motivating them to explore their environment,” upholds “the rights of children to find their own voices, articulate their own sense of justice, and participate in democratic processes within their families and schools,” encourages the creation of expression—pictures, play, song, or otherwise— “as a means of working through intense, sometimes overwhelming emotions,” and prioritizes explanations and discussions rather than orders or dictated truth. Its advocates “mostly saw themselves as progressive, trying to change the structure and goals of the American family and pave the way for larger changes in the national culture. They wanted to raise children who would be more open to diversity, more willing to embrace democratic citizenship, better prepared to deal with a rapidly changing world, more capable of embracing global brotherhood, and more comfortable with their own bodies.”
This permissive mindset was deracialized and tried to avoid conscious racial stereotypes, but, in doing so, “1950s and 1960s children’s fictions also stepped away from representing people of color, complicit in segregation regardless of their liberal self-perceptions.” Black parents faced particular risks raising their children, especially boys, according to Dr. Spock, whose encouragement of exploration could easily be read by authorities as defiance. This made permissiveness “a form of white privilege, no matter how much these authors might have wished otherwise.”
Child-rearing advocates directly engaged with children’s media-makers, and Jenkins mines the latter’s texts to tell us “about adults, their values, their aspirations, their emotional needs,” rather than about children’s actual experiences. Although they’ve been criticized as predecessors of today’s intensive parenting, which weighs heavily on women, many of those trying to reform parenting were women’s rights activists trying to reason from their own direct observations of children rather than abstract theorizing. These “permissive writers reconceptualized fatherhood, shifting attention from fathers’ traditional functions as breadwinner and disciplinarian toward a new role as playmate.” Weary fathers could get renewed by playing with their sons, while modeling masculinity to them. Play was “an escape from social control, as a space of the free imagination,” but also an entry point for leisure- and consumption-oriented consumerism. And permissiveness also “allowed adults to rethink their domestic lives as helping to construct a more democratic society, and through the representation of the child as a ‘wild thing,’ to imagine the possibilities for their own escape from constrained roles.” But that also meant that fathers retreated from the world with their sons, rather than teaching them how to be adults.
Dennis the Menace was an example of the brand of conservatism that celebrated “an irrepressible masculine spirit” and “boyhood as a force of opposition.” Jenkins contrasts Dennis to the immigrant “real” menaces of the 20s, the Katzenjammer kids—I wonder what he’d say about The Great Brain books of the late 60s/70s and similar books. (Looking those books up, I found out they were edited by E.L. Doctorow. The more you know!) In fact, Dennis is a national metaphor: “America was trying to mask its newly discovered geopolitical influence and its intrusions into other nations’ sovereignty behind a different myth of childlike innocence.” Sure, it did bad things, but it was good at heart.
Like sf, children’s stories used metaphor instead of actual Black characters. I loved Jenkins’ discussion of Dumbo. He points out that, although the black crows living on the outskirts of town are painfully stereotypical, they also (like the “magical Negro” trope) enable Dumbo’s success: “Their acceptance of the misfit pachyderm gives him the courage to gain acceptance by the circus society. … Such stories show how the culture spoke about the need to accept and even celebrate difference without naming any specific form of difference. We can’t say Dumbo is queer, disabled, or Black, though his story might have addressed each of these issues for specific viewers.”
Mr. Rogers modeled permissive ideals for decades longer than other prominent promoters, even after permissiveness lost its dominance, “which is why Rogers, today, is seen as a unique rather than representative figure—in some ways, a man out of his time.” By the late 60s/early 70s, permissiveness was controversial to new people, and Black parents and advice-givers in particular had to grapple with it. “While parenting books by white writers generally focus on psychology, these authors turned to sociological perspectives. They could not consider how to raise ‘normal’ Black children without asking core questions about the society where they were coming of age.” Things like feeding on demand, “an early breakthrough for permissive parenting,” had more tradeoffs for working mothers, and a fixed schedule could help children learn patience, since Black children needed to be prepared for hardship and constraint as well as for rights assertion in the face of discrimination.
I learned that Jonny Quest had a South Asian sidekick so the author could get a “child of the streets” but not “the typical black kid from the ghetto which so many others had used in comic strips and comic books at the time.” As Jenkins puts it, “casting Hadji was about displacing Blackness, shifting from a civil rights frame to a global-brotherhood one, which somehow felt less stereotypical.”
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