Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America is perhaps the most influential in recent American historiography. If you’ve been meaning to read it but haven’t yet gotten around to its 900 pages, Scott Alexander provides a lively synopsis at SlateStarCodex.com that is at least an order of magnitude shorter.
But how does Donald Trump fit into this handy model?
In general, Trump is a nightmare for making sense of via Fischer’s Albion’s Seed model. His background combines a whole bunch of aspects of America that Fischer de-emphasized in his book:
– New York City (home)
– Scottish Highlanders (mother)
– Germans (father)
– Jews (Trump has spent 50 years in a predominantly Jewish industry, New York real estate)
– Irish Catholics (Trump attended Fordham)
– Italians (Trump has presumably paid off a few Mafioso in the construction site port-a-john business)
Trump is a like a cyborg from the future specifically engineered to cause analytical trouble for people like me who’d gotten comfortable using Albion’s Seed as a cheat sheet.
COMMENTS:
* The old thread has been broken. All is in limbo.
If the sun were to be disappear, the planets will no longer revolve in orbit and seek a new gravitational system.
Adrift we is.
