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Johnson County election board member Phil Barrow holds the door open for County Maintenance Worker Shaun Spears, as he delivers voting machines to the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Today is Election Day, the day for voters to make their voices heard.

From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. today, voters will cast ballots to select candidates in multiple contested races at the local level. In some races, whoever wins today will likely be the person to hold office next year, unless Democrat or a Libertarian enters races to challenge them before the November municipal election.

Voters taking the Republican ballot have choices for every city and town, though only Bargersville, Franklin, Greenwood, Princes Lakes, Trafalgar and Whiteland have contested primaries. Only Johnson County residents who live within municipal boundaries can vote this year.

A total of 81,033 Johnson County residents who live in municipalities are registered and eligible to vote in the primary election. For the primary, 3,007 people cast their vote through in-person early voting by close of early voting at noon Monday, according to Johnson County Voter Registration.

From left, Johnson County maintenance workers Aaron Miller, Noah Henson and Shaun Spears unload voting machines at the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Johnson County maintenance workers Aaron Miller, left, and Noah Henson deliver voting equipment to the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Johnson County Maintenance Worker Shaun Spears delivers voting machines to the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Johnson County election board member Phil Barrow holds the door open for County Maintenance Worker Shaun Spears, as he delivers voting machines to the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Johnson County Election Board Member Phil Barrow, left, signs off on election equipment delivery paperwork as board member Kevin Service watches from above at the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Johnson County Election Board Member Kevin Service signs off on election equipment delivery paperwork at the Franklin Community Center on Monday.

Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal

Supporters of Mayor Mark Myers and Greenwood City Council District 4 candidate Teri Manship campaign outside the Greenwood Public Library during early voting on Saturday.

Leeann Doerflein | Daily Journal

Greenwood mayoral candidate Joe Hubbard, far left, and Greenwood City Council at-large candidate Erin Betron, second from left, campaign outside the Greenwood Public Library with supporters during early voting on Saturday.

Leeann Doerflein | Daily Journal

Steve Moan, an at-large candidate for Greenwood City Council, speaks to a voter outside the Greenwood Public Library during early voting on Saturday.

Leeann Doerflein | Daily Journal

Linda Gibson, an incumbent seeking reelection in Greenwood City Council District 1, and Ronald Palmer Jr., son of at-large city council candidate Ronald Palmer, Sr., campaign outside the Greenwood Public Library during early voting on Saturday.

Leeann Doerflein | Daily Journal

In Greenwood, there are contested races for mayor, city judge, city council districts 1, 4 and 5, along with city council at-large. Bargersville voters will see contested clerk-treasurer and town council at-large races, while voters in Franklin, Princes Lakes and Trafalgar all have contested city or town council at-large races.

Whiteland voters have contested races for town council districts 1 and 2. Though the town council is split into districts, everyone in the town votes for these offices regardless of where they live.

There are Democrats on the ballot for Bargersville and Whiteland town council at-large, along with Greenwood city council districts 3 and 4, but none of these races are contested. Democrat ballots will only be available for voters who live in Bargersville, Whiteland, or districts in Greenwood with a Democrat on the ballot.

A total of 15 vote centers will open in churches, libraries and government buildings across the county. Johnson County voters can use any vote center in the county.

Voters going to the polls must remember to bring their state-issued drivers license or ID, or another form of acceptable identification. These other forms include passports, military IDs or an ID from a state-funded college, according to the Indiana Secretary of States Office.

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles locations will be open to issue a voter ID for anyone who doesnt have one, according to the agency. The BMV will have extended hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday.

ELECTION DAY VOTE CENTERS

Here is a look at where you can cast your ballot in person from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. today:

Mt. Auburn Church, 3100 W. Stones Crossing Road, Greenwood

White River Public Library, 1664 Library Boulevard, Greenwood

Community Church of Greenwood (main entrance foyer), 1477 W. Main St, Greenwood

Greenwood Christian Church, 2045 Averitt Road, Greenwood

Greenwood Public Library (east door), 310 S. Meridian St., Greenwood

Greenwood Bible Baptist Church, 1461 Sheek Road, Greenwood

Grace Assembly of God, 6822 N. U.S. Highway 31, New Whiteland

Clark Pleasant Public Library, 350 Clearwater Boulevard, Whiteland

Bargersville Town Hall, 24 N. Main St., Bargersville

Franklin Community Center, 396 Branigin Boulevard/State St., Franklin

Grace United Methodist Church, 1300 E. Adams Drive, Franklin

Trafalgar Public Library, 424 S. Tower St., Trafalgar

Princes Lakes Town Hall, 14 E. Lakeview Drive, Nineveh

John R. Drybread Community Center, 100 E. Main Cross St., Edinburgh

Scott Hall, Johnson County Fairgrounds, 250 Fairground St., Franklin

A map of Johnson County vote centers for the May 2 primary.Map provided by Johnson County Voter Registration

ELECTION CENTRAL

Stay in the loop. Get the latest vote totals tonight on our website: dailyjournal.net.

Need to know more about the candidates in this years election? Go online to dailyjournal.net/local/elections/.

TELL US YOUR STORY

Let us know how voting goes for you. Lines wrapped around the building? Didnt have the correct ID? End up at a vote center thats closed this election? Call us at 317-736-2774 or email newstips@dailyjournal.net.

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What to know before you vote in Johnson County - Daily Journal

Small States Are Best, and the E.U. Is Huge

Affirmative: Daniel Hannan

Small is beautiful. That, in a nutshell, is the case against the European Union. If you want to make the same point in more grandiose language, you can quote Aristotle: "To the size of a state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and instruments, none of which can retain their natural facility when too large."

Here's one practical test of his thesis. Which states or territories have the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per head? Depending on whose measure we use, the top five are Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Brunei (according to Worldometer); Monaco, Liechtenstein, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands (according to the International Monetary Fund); or the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, the Faroe Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam (according to the United Nations). Notice what they all have in common?

Europhiles might object that the E.U. is not a state, and that the very presence of Luxembourg in one of those tables suggests that it can't be doing too badly. But look at the direction of travel. At first, the European Economic Community (EEC)the clue was in the namecould reasonably be described as an international association, focused on eliminating trade barriers among its members. True, it did so at the expense of trade with nonmembers. Unlike NAFTA or the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the EEC was not a free trade area but a customs union, controlling all commerce on behalf of its members and artificially redirecting trade away from the rest of the world. Still, it was a club of nations rather than a superstate.

That changed when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993. Suddenly, Brussels had a hand in almost every field of government activity: foreign policy, criminal justice, the environment, culture, immigration, defense. It was now that, in recognition of its vastly expanded ambitions, it stopped being the EEC and became the European Union.

A big polity can prosper, but only if it behaves like a confederation of statelets. The supreme exemplar is the U.S., the only large nation that gets anywhere near the top of those GDP rankings (coming in, respectively, at 7, 7, and 10 in the three lists cited above). American states and counties have powers that exceed those of any local authorities in Europeexcept in Switzerland, which, largely because it wants to retain its devolved political system, has declined to join the European Union. Delaware, unlike Denmark, can set its own sales taxes. Pennsylvania, unlike Poland, can decide whether to allow capital punishment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not wild about the direction the U.S. has been taking either. Power is shifting from the states to Washington, D.C., from the legislature to the executive, and, indeed, from the citizen to the government. But the U.S. is starting from a much better place. It was designed according to Jeffersonian principles. Power was dispersed, decentralized, and democratized.

The E.U., by contrast, was designed to weld nations into a supranational bloc. The first article of its founding charter, the Treaty of Rome, commits its members to an "ever-closer union." The European Court of Justice has repeatedly cited that clause to justify power grabs that go beyond anything foreseen by the treaties.

The U.S. Constitution is an imperfect document, but, as P.J. O'Rourke said, it's better than what you've got now. The E.U. treaties, by contrast, don't even pretend to restrict state power. Where the Declaration of Independence promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, its European equivalent, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, entitles people to "strike action," "affordable housing," and "free healthcare."

True, nation-states can be as intrusive and dirigiste as the European Union. But the aggregate picture is clear. The cheapest and most accountable administrations are those closest to the people. Local government is (not always, but on average) more efficient than national government, national government more efficient than supranational government.

In theory, one could imagine an E.U. that did not concern itself with behind-border issuesan E.U., in short, more like EFTA or NAFTA. But that is not what we have. The real E.U. has policies on every aspect of life, from permissible noise levels to the status of disabled people, from the rights of asylum seekers to space exploration. No wonder most British libertarians voted to leave it.

Negative: Dalibor Rohac

Many valid criticisms can be addressed at the European Union. The Brussels machinery is bureaucratic and largely insulated from accountability. When it comes to new markets and new technologies, European institutions regulate first and ask questions later. The E.U. controls a sizable budget, part of it wastefulincluding generous agricultural subsidies and transfer programs that have entrenched aspiring autocrats in countries such as Hungary.

Yet the E.U.'s existence is infinitely preferable to its absence. It is a prime example of the "nirvana fallacy" to compare the E.U. and its flaws to a libertarian ideal of free trade and unregulated markets. The relevant comparison is between the E.U. and the politically plausible alternatives.

Those alternatives almost certainly involve protectionism, heavy-handed industrial policy and planning, or state aid to politically connected companiesand they could involve ethnic conflict and war. If it weren't for the pressure of the European Commission in the late 1980s, it is fanciful to think that Italy or France would have just given up state ownership of utilities, banks, or their industrial giants.

Conversely, the United Kingdom has not become a free market paradise after leaving the European Union. Quite the opposite. The U.K. economy, already constrained by self-imposed "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) regulations, is being burdened by new barriers to cross-border commerce with continental Europehence the dismal growth record three years into leaving the bloc.

Again, the E.U.'s "single market" is far from perfect. It is effectively nonexistent in the area of services, for example. And in areas where it does work, it often goes hand in hand with harmonized European rules rather than with simple mutual recognition of national standards.

Yet the single market is a singular achievement. It is one thing to prescribe the free movement of goods, capital, and people within the continental United States under the auspices of a powerful federal government. It is quite another to arrive at such an outcome through the largely voluntary efforts of E.U. member states.

Could we imagine an alternative that would be superior, from a libertarian standpoint? Sure: Eliminate tariffs and embrace mutual recognition of national rules. But that's never going to happen. The experience with existing mutual recognition arrangements from around the world shows that under wide differences between regulatory regimes, mutual recognition is politically unsustainable.

In other words, the layer of E.U. rules is a price to pay for the absence of nontariff barriers. This is arguably not a very hefty price to pay, given that some E.U. countries (the Nordics, Baltics, the Netherlands) are among the most competitive economies around the world, and given that nonmembers have voluntarily embraced those rules (Norway) or are very keen to do so (Ukraine).

It is misleading to compare the E.U.'s single market with 19th century Europe, and not just because 19th century Europe did not have a modern regulatory state. The "first age of globalization" was driven more by improvements in transportation than by wise trade policy. If anything, the free trade system started gradually eroding in the 1870s before completely collapsing in World War I.

Contrary to conservative-nationalist folklore, the E.U. is not a nefarious top-down plot to subvert national sovereignty and self-governance. It is an imperfect compromise resulting from decadeslong efforts by democratically elected leaders, and it enjoys broad, consistent popular support. (Two-thirds of Europeans back it, according to a recent Eurobarometer poll.)

One can understand why Americans or Brits might look with suspicion at the E.U.'s convoluted decision making processes. Yet the E.U.'s odd architecture reflects something distinctly Europeanthe uneasy tension between common cultural references and the sheer diversity of the continent. It is not a coincidence that for almost two millennia Europe saw a succession of weird, multilayered, quasi-federal structures of governance, from the Holy Roman Empire through leagues of city states to multinational "republics" such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

England aside, the "sovereign" nation-state is a late19th century addition to Europe's political realities. And needless to say, the founding generation of the modern libertarian movement had a keen understanding of the fact that this period was not exactly friendly to freedom, markets, and peace.

Has the E.U. lived up fully to the ideals of Hayekian international federalism? Of course not. But it is blindingly obvious that it has performed better than the relevant alternatives.

Subscribers have access toReason's wholeMay 2023 issue now. These debates and the rest of the issue will be released throughout the month for everyone else. Consider subscribing today!

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Debate: The E.U. Was a Mistake - Reason

In HBO's The Last of Us, a handful of human survivors struggle to get by in a world overrun by formerly human, zombie-like monsters. It portrays its post-apocalyptic America as bleak and authoritarian, with a quasi-federal security apparatus, FEDRA, maintaining brutal control over the remaining population centers. Trade and travel are heavily restrictedthe show presents the zombie apocalypse as a libertarian nightmare.

The third episode specifically can be understood as a vindication, or at least humanization, of libertarian survivalists, who are normally portrayed as cranks. The story follows Bill, a gun-nut bunker-dweller who mumbles rants to himself about how FEDRA is the New World Order. When an uninfected man named Frank falls into a trap Bill has set, he lets Frank into his home.

Over time, they fall in love, squabbling about gardens as well as politics: "You live in a psycho bunker where 9/11 was an inside job and the government are all Nazis." Bill retorts, "The government are all Nazis!"

In the show's world, he's right, but it's not his politics that make him sympathetic. His capacity to love and be loved, and the ways that human bonds transcend ideology, give him dignity.

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Review: 'The Last of Us' Humanizes Libertarian Survivalists - Reason

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) The slaughterhouse cleaning company that was found to be employing more than 100 children to help sanitize dangerous razor-sharp equipment like bone saws has continued to lose contracts with the major meat producers since the investigation became public last fall.

For its part, Packers Sanitation Services Inc., or PSSI as it is known, said it has taken a number of steps to tighten up its hiring practices but it says the rising number of child labor cases nationwide is likely related to the increase in the number of minors crossing the U.S. border alone in recent years.

The scandal that followed the February announcement that PSSI would pay a $1.5 million fine and reform its hiring practices as part of an agreement with investigators also prompted the Biden administration to urge the entire meat processing industry to take steps to ensure no kids are working in these plants either for the meat companies or at contractors like PSSI.

Federal investigators confirmed that children as young as 13 were working for PSSI at 13 plants in Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas. It wasn't immediately clear if any additional children have been found working for the company because PSSI declined to answer that and government officials haven't offered an update on the investigation since February.

The Labor Department has said there has been a 69% increase since 2018 in the number of children being employed illegally nationwide, and it has more than 600 child labor investigations underway. Officials have said they are particularly concerned about the potential exploitation of migrants who may not even have a parent in the United States.

PSSI maintains that it prohibits hiring kids and the only way children could have been hired is through deliberate identity theft or fraud at a local plant. Regardless of the reason they occurred, it is our responsibility to address the problem.

As has been widely reported, the recent record rise in unaccompanied minors from abroad and rising prevalence of identity theft has clearly revealed new vulnerabilities in the area of underage labor across hundreds of different businesses including ours, PSSI spokesman Ray Hernandez said.

Companies like PSSI are put in a difficult situation of having to turn away applicants who appear to have a valid ID when they want to hire workers, and they also have to be careful not to discriminate by imposing extra scrutiny on immigrants, said David Bier, an immigration policy expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute that advocates for more open immigration laws. The fact that more than half a million children have crossed the border without their parents since 2019 creates a large group of minors who may try to get jobs.

"Seventeen-year-old, 16-year-old or 15-year-old even gets an ID and a company needs workers, its difficult to police, Bier said. And the meatpacking industry is always desperate to find more workers. If youre willing to do the work and you have an ID, then youre going to be able to get a job.

Cargill, Tyson Foods and JBS have all terminated contracts with PSSI at at least some of their plants particularly any plants where Labor Department investigators confirmed children were working although Cargill went furthest and cut ties with the Kieler, Wisconsin-based company entirely. Another meat processing giant, Smithfield Foods, said only that it is taking a close look at its contracts with PSSI, which currently cleans about one-third of the companys 45 plants, to ensure that all labor laws are being followed.

Those four companies, along with National Beef, control over 80% of the beef market and more than 60% of the pork market nationwide. National Beef didnt respond to questions about its actions.

Cargill spokeswoman April Nelson said the company notified PSSI in March that it would end all 14 of its contracts because we will not tolerate the use of underage labor within our facilities or supplier network.

Tyson and JBS officials also reiterated their commitment to eliminating child labor in their plants, and they said each of their companies had ended PSSI contracts at several plants. But they declined to provide specific numbers about how many contracts they cut and how many plants PSSI is still cleaning for them.

Tyson Foods is committed to compliance with all labor laws and holding those we do business with to the highest standards of accountability, said Dan Turton, a senior vice president at Tyson, in a letter to members of Congress about their child labor concerns. He promised Tyson would step up its audits of contractors and continue cooperating with federal officials to ensure its own hiring meets all standards.

The major meat processors say they are looking to bring more of the cleaning work at their plants in house, but they will likely continue to rely on contractors in many places. Tyson, for instance, said that its own workers clean about 40% of its plants.

PSSI wouldn't say how many workers it has laid off after losing contracts, but the way it describes itself on its website hints at the job losses. PSSI now says it has about 16,500 employees nationwide working at more than 400 plants, down from the more than 17,000 it cited last fall before the investigation. Still, it remains one of the largest cleaners of food processing plants.

PSSI says it is going above and beyond what the official court agreement required to ensure no kids are working there. And the company, which is owned by the New York-based private equity firm Blackstone, named a new CEO who just took over last week after its longtime top executive retired after 24 years.

PSSI hired a former U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer to help strengthen the training its managers get to spot identity theft, and brought on a former Labor Department official to conduct monthly unannounced checks on its practices. The company also set up a hotline for employees to anonymously report any concerns.

Originally posted here:
Firm that hired kids to clean meat plants keeps losing work - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, a perspicacious liberal critic of the contemporary right and left, has an essay in the latest issue of Liberties Journal analyzing the appeal and perils of nostalgia. The appeal is universal, he argues: Like late-middle-aged adults flipping through vacation pictures that remind us, or delude us into thinking, that family relations were once simpler and happier than they are now, almost every society finds itself mythologizing and romanticizing its own origin or past. But the peril is inherent in the romance: No less than the utopian futurist, the backward-looking romantic is tempted to violently wrench the present out of joint, to sacrifice lives and treasure on the altar of a lost wholeness, a fantasy of never-was.

Lilla illustrates this peril with a long discussion of the role that nostalgia and imagined pasts played in the rise and shape and savagery of National Socialism in Germany. The Hitlerian politics of nostalgia wasnt confined to fantasies of Teutonic purity, he notes; the Nazis laid claim to the heritage of Greece as well, with Adolf Hitler himself drawing a parallel between the Spartan practice of abandoning handicapped children in the wild and his regimes industrialized-scale eugenic cleansing. And that kind of invocation, the conscious linkage of the ancient world to the modern present, was itself an imitation of the spirit of Augustan-age Rome, whose cultural project, embodied most of all by Virgil, was to redirect nostalgia for the past toward the future and raise the prospect of leapfrogging over the present to arrive at a utopian world to come.

In this sense, Lilla argues, the ideologies of modern fascism are all heirs to the Aeneid.

I think this is true, but the nature of its truth suggests a necessary counterpoint to Lillas critique or maybe an extension and complication of his argument, since I doubt he would fully rule out a constructive role for nostalgia in human civilization. Because Virgils Aeneid is, after all, one of the central artistic works of Western history, and the larger Augustan Age is likewise well remembered for good reason. So the influence of both Virgil and his era runs down through time through countless channels: Renaissance art, 18th-century poetry, early modern political theory, neoclassical architecture and more. The fascists were heirs to Augustan Rome not because of an affinity between their worldviews, but because Augustan Rome had a lot of would-be heirs.

And it had all those heirs and imitators because the phenomenon Lilla describes, the redirection of nostalgia for past greatness toward a vision of the future, is an essential part of human civilization-building. It is not that you have the steady march of progress on the one hand and on the other, people throwing themselves backward into fantasies of lost arcadias as some kind of escapist alternative. The relationship is much more complicated. What we think of as moral and cultural progress is often dependent on backward glances, rediscoveries and recoveries that enable escapes from the cul-de-sac of presentism, the repetitions of decadence. Or alternatively, nostalgic rediscoveries are often necessary to humanize and tame the excesses of progress, to maintain continuities that might otherwise be shattered by social or technological shifts.

The nostalgia of Victorian pastoralists like John Ruskin, whom Lilla refers to, would be an example of the second category with Gothic-revival architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement as necessary humanizing forces amid the turmoil of the new industrial society.

For an example of the first category, you could look at the Italian Renaissance, the founding of the State of Israel or the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Or for that matter, you could just look around: The American republic, our oh-so-modern and liberal home, was itself founded upon a lot of the backward-looking impulses (toward ancient Greece, toward the Hebrew Bible and the Anglo-Saxons) that Lilla identifies with 20th-century fascism. It was a new order for the ages, but what was the Freemasonry, whose symbols decorate our legal tender, if not an example of invented tradition, no less than any Nazi myth of Aryan antiquity?

The point being, what was fundamentally wrong with the Nazis was not that they were interested in the restoration of imagined glories; its that they were moral monsters who included mass murder among the glories of the past. Or to take Lillas formulation about nostalgists leapfrogging over the present to arrive at a utopian world to come, the problem there is the utopianism, the belief in a perfect society that necessarily requires the elimination of anything and anyone that doesnt fit. Its not the idea of going backward in the hopes of leapfrogging ahead, of trying to find somewhere new and different via some kind of connection with antiquity.

That idea seems more neutral than lamentable, with its moral valence depending on what you are trying to revive or reinvent (a renaissance in Nahuatl literature, good; a revival of Mesoamerican human sacrifice, bad). But even the word neutral makes creative nostalgia sound like a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing; better to say that its an inextricable component of human culture-making that, like any such aspect, can be turned to wicked ends but cant be purged or exorcised, except at a great cost to any future creativity or progress.

Which brings me around to our own era. Lilla concludes his essay with a warning that political nostalgia is now filling the vacuum left by the abandonment of progressive ideologies like socialism and democratic liberalism with implicit references to Western populism and explicit ones to Indias Hindutva movement and the civilizational ambitions of Moscow and Beijing.

But one can go back and read an exemplary Lilla essay from nine years ago, before the populist surge, when he was writing on the emptiness and willful historical ignorance of a libertarian-inflected neoliberalism at the end of history, and gain a slightly different perspective on our situation. Heres some of what Lilla wrote then:

Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless.

Try to convey the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989 to young students today American, European, even Chinese students and you are left feeling like a blind poet singing of lost Atlantis. Fascism for them is radical evil, hence incomprehensible; how it could develop and why it appealed to millions remains a mystery. Communism, while of course it was for many good things, makes little sense either, especially the faith that people invested in the Soviet Union.

ours is a libertarian age by default: whatever ideas or beliefs or feelings muted the demand for individual autonomy in the past have atrophied.

Our libertarianism is supremely dogmatic, and like every dogma it sanctions ignorance about the world, and therefore blinds adherents to its effects in that world. It begins with basic liberal principles the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority, tolerance and advances no further. It has no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going.

If this is really where weve ended up, then maybe its not quite right to say that liberal and democratic ideals have been rashly thrown over for the sake of a dangerous nostalgia. Maybe the circumstances Lilla described in 2014 made some kind of retrospective yearning or questing more or less inevitable as a natural response to a landscape where progress seemed to have ended in boredom, repetition, intellectual sterility, liberal democracy as a dogma rather than a practice, all under the stewardship of what Lilla, then, called a leadership class of self-satisfied abstainers removed from history.

He would draw a distinction, I suspect, between the neoliberal vapidity he described in that essay and the more robust form of democratic liberalism he posits as an alternative to nationalist nostalgia now. But maybe robustness within democratic liberalism is dependent, as the more conservative kind of liberal has long argued, on a pre-liberal inheritance for both stability and vigor, and when that inheritance is spent, liberalism alone does not suffice for its rebuilding. In which case, the quest for a usable past, the invention and reinvention of tradition, is essential to any forward-looking movement, left-wing as well as right-wing because as much as history is subject to mythologization and falsification, its still more accessible than the unknown future, still the most powerful cultural material we have.

Like Lilla, Im dissatisfied with the kinds of reinvented tradition on offer at the moment a category that encompasses certain forms of left-wing antiquarianism, like the hunt for exemplars of Indigenous power in the colonial past, as well as the nationalist romances of the right.

But these efforts should be critiqued on specific moral or intellectual grounds, not dismissed on principle. Their appeal cant be answered by simply telling people not to be nostalgic or warning them against the desire for regeneration. Because when progress leads to decadence, there is no way forward that does not go some distance or some direction back.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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In defense of nostalgia - Kathimerini English Edition