Henry James was not at home in America

Another publisher who hates their content so much they make it impossible to read with multiple flying adverts and so on. I was interested but gave up fighting to read it.

Now here's a guy who said, "If Rutherford B. Hayes wins this election then so help me I will move out of the country forever and I mean it", and he meant it.

> Everywhere James looked, he saw money motivating people away from the cultural pleasures and beauties that he loved (theaters, libraries, and art galleries). It is hard to think of an American writer who was more disgusted with the dirty realities of capitalism, or one who worked so hard to make money doing the brighter, cleaner things he loved—composing books, stories, plays, and essays.

Henry James had this thought in 1907, and I had this epiphany in 2019. But now the hyper-financialization of the West has so thoroughly permeated life that people cannot even fathom an alternative. Westerners cannot even imagine what life looks like outside the over-optimized, over-financed, late-stage capitalist West, and I say this as a person born and raised in Canada.

In 2019 I moved to a small, poor, non-EU, European country. The first thing I noticed was how well the restaurants were decorated, as if the owners put their heart and soul into it, profit-be-damned. And I only paid $10 for the meal. It's breathtakingly beautiful, yet still incredibly cheap. As I stayed over the years, I got a taste for what an entirely different life looks like outside the late-stage capitalist West. Small boutique coffee shops, mom-and-pop custom furniture stores, local clothing manufacturers, family-run hotels, lots of small independent entrepreneurial ventures - things that could not exist in America anymore due to the stranglehold of megacorps and private equity like BlackRock. It's more than just a breath of fresh air, it's actually something of heaven on earth. It's what I imagine Henry James America looked like.