Apparently, New Yorkers have gone from being a drinking, partying, womanizing, rough-talking lot to boring politically correct serious bureaucrat types.
The Greek author of the article alleges that when Anglo-Saxon Americans were dominant, they kept a fun-loving anti-politically-correct culture. Now, with more Catholic Americans of Italian, Irish, or German descent occupying important positions of the elite centered in New York, everybody has become as boring and serious as them.
All of it is broad sweeping generalizations, of course, but interesting nonetheless.
lol seems like he’s just talking about the upscale parts of Manhattan. If you want to include the other boroughs then you’ll find all the drinking, partying, womanizing, and foul-talking people you could ever want.
I think it’s the other way around. The East coast WASPs were the Yankees who were pietists and sought to use the state to force others to conform to their beliefs. On other hand, it has been the Catholics/Germans who were the supporters of laizzse-faire.
In the 19th century, the northerners WASPs were Republicans, while the Germans and Catholics were part of the old classical liberal Democratic party.
It does beg the question of why the Jew York Times (terrible pun, could not resist it) is one of the most statist newspapers out there.
Perhaps it hints that New York, a port city through which most foreign cultures enter US, brings in itself some of the more oppressive ideas of central European, east European, and Mediterranean cultures?
Now, the somewhat below average HuffPo had an article by a nephew of a Red-baiter, who quite rightly was saying that political language had become meaningless, much the way the language of Red-baiters in his uncle’s day used to be. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saul-friedman/im-old-enough-to-remember_b_567033.html But what I found interesting was that the European immigrant community was already calling the traditional established isolationist Americans to be “fascists” because they refused to take action against Hitler. It is pretty bold that central Europeans bring their ideas and values to a foreign land, rather than accept the values of the foreign land into them. And they do it to the point of name-calling the local peoples for their traditional ideals.
Indeed, central European immigrant communities seemed to hold to more utopian revolutionary ideals, and thus were more inclined towards a radically empowered state. It’s pretty visible when you see Robert Nozick’s background of “social-democratic orientation, picked up pretty much by accident from his New York Jewish environment”. http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico15.html
It’s an old saying that we do not live in the past, but the past in us. People always bring values of their ancestors to new places. And although English-descended Americans did have an extremely authoritarian bent, to the point of killing Southerners for daring to dissent, somehow the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon American by a newer wave of Polish, Hungarian, Austrian, or German immigrants in the 20th century saw an increase in statist opinion and bent. Let’s not forget the hardcore Catholic, Bill Buckley.
Interestingly, the Ivory Tower New Yorker still exists. However, the Ivory Tower New Yorker is no longer the English Protestant, but an upscale Jew or a Catholic. See Elena Kagan - a woman who seems to have spent her entire life in elitist establishments, born and raised in an upper class New York district, then went to live and work in an upper class Chicago neighbourhood, and then went to live and work in the DC Beltway. She has spent her entire life in such places. People have said she has never even seen the real America. And she was considered for the top judicial position. It certainly indicates a power shift to Catholics and Jews may have seen their bureaucratic thinking becoming more pervasive.