Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“As Generation X Approaches Retirement, Reality Still Bites”
The Wall Street Journal analyzes Gen X’s economic predicament as the generation approaches retirement: “Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen Xers launched their careers at the start of a massive shift in how Americans work. Companies moved from pensions that promise steady income after years of service, to plans such as 401(k)s that place employees’ retirement destiny in their own hands. Some Gen Xers were hit hard in their prime working years during the 2008 financial crisis. Others are still paying off student debt. Their children are increasingly living at home well into adulthood, while their own aging parents often require care. Few believe they can rely on Social Security to make ends meet later in life.”
One Gen Xer profiled in the article, David Bryan, “earns about $35,000 a year as a school-bus driver and lives on Tybee Island, Ga. He doesn’t own property and has about $100,000 in retirement savings from his previous jobs as a railroad conductor and a researcher at a college foundation. It’s a different life than that of his parents, who worked for decades for the sheriff’s department and the post office and received steady pension checks when they retired. ‘As long as my body will let me, it’s better I keep working,’ said Bryan.”
“It's Globalization, Stupid”
takes stock of where the Democrats and Republications stand on globalization at : “Now here we find ourselves, in 2024, with an influential Republican think tank that supports sectoral bargaining, an RNC in which a Teamsters president gave a keynote address, and a vice presidential nominee who wants to break up Google and Amazon and end tax incentives for big corporate mergers. At the same time, on the Democratic side, we’re in the last months of one of the most pro-union presidencies in history, and one that has made trust-busting a centerpiece of its governance. Whether a Harris administration would continue these policies is anyone’s guess, but her decision to take on ‘price gouging’ as her signature policy initiative and her promise to raise corporate taxes are both indications that she would.”Woodhouse continues: “At the moment, there is no clear line designating one side the party of labor and the other the party of capital. Both are accustomed by now to pandering to workers in public while whispering sweet nothings to corporate executives behind closed doors. At the DNC in Chicago this week, as politicians on the convention hall stage roared about ‘taking on corporate greed,’ the usual corporate lobbyists have been hosting exclusive salons and brunches for VIP attendees all over town. Meanwhile, the Trump team, despite its thunderous populist battle cries at the RNC, is running a standard issue, pro-business Republican campaign, replete with promises to further cut corporate tax rates and remove corporate regulations, just as he did as president. The political future belongs to whichever party makes a clean break with the neoliberal past and wholly embodies populism in word and deed. So far, we’ve seen only half-steps from both.”
For more about the bipartisan messaging and policy shifts on globalization, see my article “We Are All Trumpians Now.”
“Egalitarian Conquerors”
explores the paradoxes of “political Nietzscheanism” and (post)-Christianity for : “Why do those who embody master morality keep being defeated, while the side of slave morality keeps proving to be stronger? If slave morality manifests only as actual strength, what are we even talking about? Consider that the two great superpowers that dominated the earth in the 20th century were both based on the values of universal equality. The two powers competing for dominance in the 21st century are the USA, which has wokeness as its imperial secular religion, and Communist China.”Nagle concludes: “Equality and universalism were among the primary values of the Enlightenment, which enabled European man to lead the modern age. Lincoln freed the slaves but, through the Civil War, overthrew the land-based Southern gentry and replaced them with the hyper-productive and innovative industrial class, thus setting America on the path to world domination. The hierarchical value system of the aristocrats in all these cases would have led to agrarian stagnation and, ultimately, subjugation by a more technologically advanced invading society. As I have written about previously, the Habakkuk thesis claimed that labor scarcity enabled fast industrial development through forced innovation in mechanization, contrasted with other societies that didn’t innovate because of the abundance of slaves or an excess of cheap labor. Time and time again, this pattern seems to repeat. The values of egalitarianism appear to produce great strength.”
“Off the Grid, Extremely Online”
The New York Times reports on the contemporary American homesteading movement, which sometimes combines a “back to the land” lifestyle with a strong social media presence: “Modern homesteading is not a monolithic, doctrinal pursuit. The scope of what could be considered ‘homesteading’ is a spectrum, from the aspirational ‘tradwife,’ or traditional wife, aesthetic of Ballerina Farm — the social media account run by Hannah Neeleman, who documents life caring for eight children on a ranch in Utah — to the soot-covered William Uhlhorn, a Gen Z everyman who documents his efforts to build primitive shelters in undeveloped environments. In between, there are tiny-home influencers, #VanLife converts and others who went off the grid long before doing so held the potential for internet fame.”
“In his videos, Mr. [Nate] Petroski’s only discernible political leanings are a sense of individualism tempered by the realities of his remote existence; at Narroway, an AR-15 with a lowlight scope hangs next to his bed. One morning, a flurry of gunshots from an adjacent property sent Mr. Petroski flying down the road on an ATV to investigate, handgun strapped to his side. It turned out a neighbor was just enthusiastically testing a new rifle. Mr. Uhlhorn is similarly reticent on political matters, though he said life in the woods had offered him something society had not: a purpose and a vocation. Mr. Uhlhorn said his journey began when he was sitting on a couch during the pandemic, scrolling through TikTok. ‘I was like, bro, I got to fill my time with something,’ he said. ‘And so I just went out to the woods with a little hand saw and tried making something.’”
To read more about an overlapping subculture, see “The Dawn of the Bohemian Peasants,” a fascinating (and entertaining) article featured way back in Weekly Grounding #10.
“A Library of Unconformed Lives”
On a similar note,
and present stories of their readers “living unconformed lives in a digital age” at : “Nasa engineer, NGO worker, nurse, editor, extrovert, goat herder, graphic designer, gardener, father, film maker, financial advisor, farmer, mother, mechanic, manager, missionary, psychologist, plumber, priest, investor, introvert, teenager, boomer, octogenarian — this rich mosaic of people is a small sample of the readers of School of the Unconformed. There are few current concerns where people who differ so greatly in their personal lives and worldviews unite on common ground. The movement of people seeking to unmachine their lives is growing and spans across the political, professional, religious, and age spectrum. And it affirms that people are ready to resist the trend toward the ever greater incursion of digital technology in our daily lives.”“Sampling the 2024 Blogosphere”
Also in compilation mode,
highlights a wide range of online writing at . Among the essays featured is one I wrote earlier this year on Handful of Earth, “Does This Political Category Exist?” In it, I explore the possibility of the Conservative, Egalitarian, Individualist, Spiritual-Intuitive (CEIS) political personality type inspired by the model of political categories developed by .What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thanks for the mention Vincent! Will be sure to take a look at the intriguing article from the New York Times article.