Recent links of note:
“How Samuel Huntington Predicted Our Political Moment”
Jason Willick, The American Interest
Although the prolific social scientist Samuel P. Huntington debuted his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis in 1992, his theory about the coming challenges to the Western order was not broadly accepted until almost a decade later, when the September 11 attacks made the emergent global clash undeniable. Now, as Jason Willick of The American Interest points out, Huntington’s prediction of a new clash in domestic politics is bearing out as well—over twelve years after he put the theory forward in a book in 2004, and eight years after his death. Huntington’s book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (reviewed in The New Criterion in 2014) precisely described the current, class-correlated divide between “cosmopolitans” and “nationalists,” years before their split grew deep enough to reshape national politics. As they watched the Republican convention unfold, many of the scholars who Willick remembers dismissing Huntington’s theory may have found themselves dusting off old copies of Who Are We, reading it frantically in an attempt to find their bearings in today’s political landscape.
“ ’Round 57th Street: New York’s First Gallery District Continues (For Now) to Weather Endless Changes in the Art World”
Robin Scher, ARTnews
As the “neighborhood price cycle” has run its course in Manhattan’s famous art havens, forcing galleries in SoHo, Chelsea, and the Lower East to flee toward cheaper shelter, there has been an unlikely resurgence of activity on 57th Street, which only a few in today’s frenzied downtown scene will recall was an early home base for New York’s circle of painters. In an article in ARTnews, Robin Scher describes 57th Street past and present with commentary from gallerists like the ninety-five-year-old Hildegard Bachert of Galerie St. Etienne, who has witnessed the neighborhood’s turn from a cheery cluster of small-scale art houses into a homogenized Midtown destination in which, until recently, only a few stubborn players remained. Scher notes that the potential for art to come full circle on 57th will depend on its galleries’ ability to outlast the rent pressure that new luxury developments in the area will surely bring.
“New Bottle, Old Whine”
Noemie Emery, The Weekly Standard
Over the course of the Republican primary campaign, which culminated this Wednesday with the official nomination of Donald Trump, Trump’s critics have expressed constant surprise at his success, suggesting that his rise has dragged American politics into uncharted territory. Not so, says The Weekly Standard’s Noemie Emery in an essay that looks back at presidential primaries in 1964 and 1972, the two most recent contests in which colorful outsiders seized the nominations of their respective parties as party elites looked on in bewilderment. Emery compares the crippled GOP establishment of 2016 to their counterparts in ’64 who failed to mobilize against Barry Goldwater’s surge, and she notes the similarity between Trump’s mastery of the media and George McGovern’s unprecedented army of campaign volunteers in 1972. In the first paragraph of the essay, Emery quotes the aphorism which claims that history “rhymes” rather than repeating itself—like many during this election cycle, she seems puzzled to see that political elites can never seem to pick up on the pattern.
From our pages:
“There and back again”
Natasha Simons
On Hadestown, a new musical from the New York Theatre Workshop.