England Alone

 Not content with hijacking American democracy, Elon Musk increasingly seems bent on destroying democracy all over the world. I don't know how else to read his increasingly flagrant meddling in the politics of other nations in order to back far-right authoritarians. Exhibit A this week would be his eerie endorsement of the extreme right AfD party in Germany. Even after this, of course, Musk will still have his defenders—particularly in the Bay Area ("power has never lacked eulogists," as Elias Canetti once wrote (Stewart trans.))—but there's really no two ways to read that one. Endorsing a neo-fascist party—in Germany, of all places—is a dead give-away. 

Some have expressed consternation that he made this choice, but it really shouldn't surprise us. Musk has generated a series of related controversies over the past few years in which he appeared to endorse Hitler apologetics and to embrace antisemitic conspiracy theories. His open backing of AfD fits the same mould. Add to this the fact that Musk's foreign policy positions all eerily align with those of authoritarian nations, like Xi's People's Republic of China (viz Musk on Taiwan) and Vladimir Putin's Russia—and it really does appear he is on a worldwide crusade to quell restive liberal democracies that stand in the way of his ambitions. 

Small and Insignificant

 All too many events recently have appeared to reward Trump's favored strategy of trying to bully people into submission. When the president issued his recent unprovoked diktats against Canada and Mexico, for instance, both of their governments more or less indulged him (perhaps, sadly, out of necessity). When Trump, Musk, and their hordes of followers attacked Joni Ernst, for appearing to waffle on the Pete Hegseth nomination, she fell into line. 

Because of this, it was particularly satisfying when House Republicans tonight finally defied his bullying threats by funding the government—without the debt ceiling increase that Trump tried to tack on. As the New York Times aptly summarizes: "President-elect Trump and Elon Musk threatened to ensure a primary challenge for any House Republican who voted for a bill that didn’t include a debt limit increase. Tonight, 170 of them did just that."

Trump and Aristophanes

 A rather downbeat New York Times article from earlier this week includes the depressing observation that one of Biden's remaining tasks—in the twilight of his administration—is to try to claim what credit he can for "the healthy economy that he is turning over to his ungrateful successor." And indeed, this describes the situation well. 

Biden successfully oversaw the recovery from the pandemic. During his administration, the U.S. economy returned to a robust pace of growth, and the post-pandemic inflation slowed to a manageable rate. Now that Biden has done the hard work of governing while the Fed performed the unpopular task of taming the labor market just enough to bring prices down—he has to hand the keys over to someone who contributed nothing to this difficult task—but who will almost certainly take home all the credit for it. 

A Bullying Hulk

 The most chilling aspect of the last few weeks is just how much power Trump has managed to consolidate already—and he's not even in office yet. Each day brings fresh news that some corporate CEO or tech insider has just lined up to kiss his ring. Trump's behavior in all this seems to establish a simple pattern of reward and punishment: he may appear magnanimous if you join Bezos and the rest in toadying and flattering him. But he will be utterly vicious and ruthless if you dare to oppose or criticize. 

His lawsuit this week against Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register is a quintessential example of his mean-spirited tactics. Obviously, it's a frivolous lawsuit. Trump will not win on the facts. But that hardly matters. The purpose of the suit is to bully, intimidate, and harass by imposing costs on others—and no doubt it will succeed in that goal. It's actually all too easy under our broken system of civil litigation to force people to pay ruinous legal bills, even when you have no serious case against them. 

The Road to Soft Authoritarianism

 Ever since the election, we've all been playing the dismal game of trying to figure out just how much of Trump's authoritarian rhetoric on the campaign trail we should take seriously. Any given day may find him saying something even more despotic and unhinged than we could have expected. And yet, the next day may find him appearing to waffle on some of his more disturbing campaign pledges. In short, he's so mercurial that his words alone don't give us much to go on. 

If we look past the shifting rhetoric of the moment, however—and focus on his actions and (crucially) the way other people are already responding to him—we start to see the outlines of how he really could severely curtail free expression in this country and transform the United States into a quasi–personalistic autocracy in a very short space of time. Indeed, we might already be partway there—and he's not even president yet. This is the road to soft authoritarianism. 

Bright Young Things 2.0

 The New York Young Republicans were back this week for another edition of their annual gala—an event where a bunch of far-right YouTube influencers gab about destroying democracy while wearing tuxedoes and fancy gowns. The aesthetic aspect of this event continues to fascinate me. It just so completely fulfills someone's worst possible conception of moral nihilism in the social media age. Here are a number of rich young New York socialites, after all, playing at apocalypse, and tossing off half-serious overtures to fascism, all while clad in black-tie. Patrick Bateman could hardly do worse. 

The New York Times coverage of the event captures the ambience perfectly. Steve Bannon, wearing his trademark quasi-militia gear, shrieks about retribution. We will show the enemies of MAGA "no mercy," Bannon roared. (Beneath the huffing and blowing, there are signs of a deep insecurity and fear on Bannon's part: what if, he appears to dread, Trump actually moderates on some of his extreme rhetoric once he retakes office? Trump, after all, appears to be trying to give himself leeway to backpedal on "mass deportation" right now—raising alarm among his far-right supporters.)

More Mystery Drones, Please

 The mystery drone story is great good fun. 

I hope we can keep it up. 

This is exactly what American politics should be. 

There's an intriguing spooky conundrum. With just the right frisson of the uncanny. 

But the stakes are also incredibly low. No one is getting hurt here. 

The Game of War

 On this week's episode of the Rational Security podcast, the various co-hosts had a version of the argument that many of us have had with our friends over the past year or more—namely: the justification, or lack thereof, of some of the Israeli government's actions under international law. They weren't talking about Gaza or the West Bank this time, however; rather: the discussion focused on Israel's choice to bomb targets inside Syria after the fall of Assad's government. 

The scale of these attacks has been astonishing. The New York Times notes that the IDF launched as many as 350 air strikes at Syrian military targets, in the wake of Assad's ouster, and before the incoming government (whatever form or none it may ultimately take) could even take power. Reportedly, these strikes demolished almost the entire Syrian navy—as well as various other assets (including, according to the IDF, the former Assad regime's chemical weapons stockpile—which none of us should miss!)

"Daddy's Home"?

 Okay, so I've written before about Tucker Carlson's bizarre "spanking" tirade at one rally during the 2024 Trump campaign. How could I not? It's such a rich vein of unintentionally self-revealing psychological material to mine. Of course, at the simplest level, Tucker's delectation over the idea of Trump bending America over his knee and giving the restive democratic public a "spanking" was a fantasy of male violence and power. It was, most obviously, something for a sadist to get off to. 

But what also struck me about it as a big give-away was that Tucker simultaneously casts himself in the receiving position. He is pulling back the psychological curtain and letting us know that he actually longs for "Daddy" to come home too. And, of course, his boot-licking adoration of various would-be strongmen, including Trump and Putin, fits the mould. On the one hand, therefore, Tucker's "spanking" fantasy is one of violent domination; but it is also—at the same time—one of obedient submission. 

Thoughts on the Fall of Assad

 With regard to events unfolding in Syria this weekend, I have to admit, sadly, that history tends to suggest this will all end horribly. Like its geographic neighbors in the Middle East, Syria is home to intense ethnic and sectarian divisions. It's quite possible that the emerging victory of the Sunni-aligned rebel forces could mean future persecution of Syria's Shia and Alawite populations. The collapse of the Assad regime—hopeful as it may appear now—could give way in the near future to more civil war and sectarian strife—just as the fall of Saddam Hussein did in Iraq, or of Qaddafi in Libya, or of Bashir in Sudan... Indeed, history suggests this is not only a possible outcome, but a likely one. 

Still, though, as Benjamin Wittes notes—even while knowing all of this, it's impossible not to be swept up in the joy and hopefulness of the moment. Millions of Syrians who have been exiled over the past decade-plus now have a chance to go home (even if it ultimately proves to be a rapidly-closing window). And a dictator who bombed his own people with chemical weapons and tortured and jailed dissidents is now stripped of power and forced to flee the country he terrorized. Only Tulsi Gabbard will be shedding any tears over that outcome. Thus, when it comes to the fall of Assad on its own terms, one can only echo Percy Bysshe Shelley's thoughts on the fall of Napoleon: 

Errata and Marginalia 029: Abish

 Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (New York, NY: New Directions, 1974). 

Among the many books I've featured in this errata series, Abish's experimental classic Alphabetical Africa seems especially to invite this particular parlor game of checking the author's work. After all, the book is written in a unique formalistic straitjacket. In the fashion of the Oulipo school of constrained writing, Abish sets himself the task of telling a complete narrative according to a set of arbitrary linguistic rules. 

Specifically, each of his chapters will only allow words beginning with certain letters of the alphabet. The first chapter allows words beginning with "a," the second with "a" and "b," the third with "a," "b," and "c," and on through the alphabet. Once Abish gets to the "Z" chapters therefore (and there are two of them)—he can use words beginning with any letter. Then he proceeds to work his way backwards—eliminating words starting with each letter in reverse alphabetical order, until he is back to only "a" again. 

Judges

 I've been listening to the Supreme Court's oral argument from yesterday in the dispute over Tennessee's ban on transgender medical care—more specifically, on hormone treatment and puberty blockers for minors—unless the minors are using these treatments to "appreciate" their sex assigned at birth. I was wholly persuaded by the plaintiffs' arguments in the case that there is no way to avoid the conclusion that the bill makes a classification by sex, and therefore at the very least should be subjected to intermediate scrutiny. After all, the bill does not ban testosterone for males, but does so for females. 

Of course, the bills' proponents can retort that "there is no sex classification here, because each sex can receive hormone treatment consistent with its assigned sex." But this is like saying that racial segregation of drinking fountains was not a racial classification, because each race could use a drinking fountain—so long as it used the drinking fountain assigned to its race. Elizabeth Prelogar, arguing for the government, made this point eloquently. The essence of group classification, she observed, is to say that each group must do the thing assigned to its group. So, yes: Tennessee's law is making a sex-based classification. 

Predatory Tariffs

 What disgusts me so much about Trump's recent threat to impose 25% tariffs on our two neighboring North American trade partners and allies, Mexico and Canada, is not only what a pointlessly idiotic and destructive policy act it would be—but also what a crude abuse of lopsided economic power. After all, even the people defending the policy can characterize it in no other terms. 

The host of Wall Street Trump apologists who have come out of the woodwork in recent weeks—since anyone in power will eventually find people willing to rationalize their actions—all make some version of this same argument (Bessent foremost among them): Trump won't really impose such completely ruinous and self-destructive tariffs, they say; he's just using this as a "bargaining tactic." 

The Phantom Public in 2024

 A friend was catching me up to speed on the latest Ezra Klein podcast. According to his recap, one of the key arguments of the most recent guests was that Democrats are falling short electorally due to a failure to swiftly and efficiently implement their own policies. Laws like the CHIPS and Science Act or the IRA are popular, these speakers argued—but heaps of the money allocated for them have simply not yet gotten out of the door. If Democrats could implement more effectively their own legislative achievements, they might not have lost the election (or so the argument went). 

I have to say I'm skeptical. I have to say that, deep in my cynical soul, I find it far more plausible that Biden could have delivered any number of billions of dollars in grants for American semiconductor manufacturing—and still have lost the election. Why? Because, even if Democrats had spent every penny that was allocated for these purposes, large numbers of people would never have heard about it. And among those who did, even fewer would have cared. 

Memory Criticism

 I don't know why I experience such a shock of recognition every time I read a Nicholson Baker novel. It may be that, in his microscopic observations of human mental processes, he has managed to tell the truth about all-but universal facts of human consciousness that had hitherto escaped notice and gone unrecorded (which is clearly his goal). Or, it may be that he and I are obsessive freaks in exactly the same way, and I just happened to find the books of the one other human being in history who thinks the way I do...

I specifically have in mind his 1991 book about John Updike—U and I, which I was reading last night. And perhaps this is not really a "novel"—it is ostensibly an essay or a piece of literary criticism; but I would class it really as a sequel to Baker's first two books: The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Like these two volumes, it is really an attempt to chronicle as closely, minutely, and accurately as possible the thought processes of the narrator. Those thought processes just happen in this case to be the ones that occur in his brain as he thinks about and tries to write an essay about John Updike. 

Spring and Fall

 My sister was telling me this afternoon about her recent efforts to clean the house. When she decided to give away a pair of old sandals, she was surprised by the level of resistance she encountered from my nephew. "Mom," he said, "you can't get rid of your sandals!" He retrieved them from the give-away box, and proceeded to shed tears over the prospect of losing them. 

This struck some deeply familiar chord in me from childhood. I immediately thought of all the inanimate objects whose loss similarly grieved me at his age. One might say—but they weren't even his sandals! But I distinctly recall feeling similarly heartbroken for days as a child when my parents decided to replace the carpet in one of our rooms; and it was not even my own. 

The Tarpeian Rock

 Reading Anatole France's classic historical novel of the French Revolution, The Gods Will Have Blood, one is astounded to realize that here, in a novel published just a few years before the First World War, is a prophecy of all the madness and delusion of the century of revolution that would follow it. Of course, it is no original insight in me that the Bolsheviks ended up recapitulating all the errors and obscenities of the Jacobin Terror. But it is astounding to see just how closely the parallels ran—and how much suffering humanity might have avoided if they had heeded the lessons of France's great novel—instead of proceeding to re-enact all of its bloodiest events, just a few years after it was published. 

In France's fanatical protagonist, Évariste Gamelin—who turns himself into a mass murderer and metaphorical parricide, all through the purest of Rousseauian intentions—we find all of the sophistries that the twentieth century's own revolutionaries would later use to acquit themselves of their own atrocities. He tells himself—we are killing the enemies of the state in order that it may one day be possible that the state will no longer have to kill. We are executing for the sake of ending capital punishment. One is reminded of that absurd quotation attributed to Lenin: that he and his fellow Revolutionaries were deploying coercion only so as to bring about the abolition of all coercion...

Cricket

Friends, I won't lie to you—this week's news has been sickening. Over the last eight years, we've watched as Donald Trump steadily purged the Republican Party of anyone who had an ounce of integrity. And now that he is poised to seize power again, the only people left are the ones who have passed through that strainer. As a result, Trump's cabinet picks this week have been a kind of sycophant olympics. The people who were willing to divest themselves of every lingering shred of self-respect are now, perversely, the only ones in a position to reap the rewards. 

There are Trump's downright incendiary picks: like his proposal to install Tulsi Gabbard at the head of the nation's intelligence community—despite (or because of) the fact that she is mostly known for her eerie sympathy with America's adversaries and for being Russian state media's favorite American politician (after, perhaps, Donald Trump himself). There are the picks that smack of sheer MAGA trollery—such as proposing Matt Gaetz as the next Attorney General, or installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of the nation's public health agencies. 

Jolly Escaped Asses

 One of the grossest things about this post-election week is how exuberant the U.S. stock market has been at the result. Trump campaigned on threats of mass deportation and destroying the Earth's climate—and now the country's richest seem positively gleeful about that fact. 

From a certain perspective, of course, all this makes sense in terms of crass self-interest. A Republican victory in the election almost certainly means the extension of Trump's tax cuts when they expire next year. Plus there's deregulation and all the rest of it. 

The Authoritarian Personality

 Now that the worst has happened and Donald Trump is definitely coming back to the White House, we are all experiencing the temptation to try to normalize him. It's hard to do otherwise. We have to get on with our lives, after all. Most of us don't plan to leave our native country just because a bully wins an election and threatens us. So we look desperately for any signs that might tell us: "meh, this will be survivable. He won't be so bad—or at least, no worse than he was during his first term." 

A New York Times article expresses a hope that's been on many of our minds: maybe Trump will somehow mellow out. Now that he's won the ultimate prize he sought, maybe he won't be so anxious to follow through on his threats of revenge. Maybe he will just bask in being the center of attention and forget his worst plans. "After all," Peter Baker writes, "he has essentially gotten everything he wants." But he adds: this take is almost certainly underestimating the depths of Trump's rage and resentment.

The Blood in the Streets

Truly, as Brecht once said, we live in dark times. In Amsterdam this past week, soccer hooligans mounted a series of antisemitic riots and attacks, in a city where some residents are still old enough to recall the Nazi occupation. There is a particularly disturbing resonance to the fact that this violence is coming so close to the anniversary of Kristallnacht this weekend...

Any of us who live near university campuses or major cities have probably seen similar displays of antisemitism over the past year. Many have not been as egregiously violent—but people have been threatened for wearing the Star of David or accosted for waving Israeli flags. And, at many Gaza-related protests, signs that appear to endorse the atrocities of October 7 have been more the default than the exception. One could find a "Glory to the Martyrs" banner at just about every one. 

Actually, Harris Did Everything Right

 I have no appetite for the intra-party recriminations that have dominated the conversation on the Left this past week—the "blame game," as one New York Times article put it. For one thing, it seems to me this conversation is completely unproductive. For another, it mostly seems to help Trump. Turning on our own leaders and institutions in a moment of defeat is an all-too-common left-wing vice, and I don't see how anyone benefits from it except the Right. 

But most importantly of all, I just don't think any of the recriminations ring true. Let's take them one at a time. 

Deontological

 The New York Times ran a piece today noting that social media—a landscape that was full of calls to action and the budding Resistance after 2016—is now eerily quiet, in the wake of a second Trump victory. The article quotes one influencer on one of the platforms who has observed this phenomenon: "I’ve seen posts from multiple people I follow, people who are like, ‘I literally used to have so much to say, and I have nothing. I got nothing today.'"

It's partly that we've used up the rhetoric of warning at this point. We've spent eight years saying: you have to take Trump's threats seriously! He wants to become a dictator! Look at his behavior! Listen to his words!" And still, people didn't listen. Or, more troubling still—maybe they did listen, and they liked what they heard. So now, what else is there to say? We've shot our bolt. We have no more warnings to add. "We've talked our extinction to death," as Robert Lowell once wrote. 

Never Give Up!

 I dutifully tuned in to Kamala Harris's respectful and conciliatory speech yesterday conceding the election. For the most part, I was still too numb to take it in at an emotional level—except, there was one moment when "my heart was shaken with tears," to borrow a phrase from Siegfried Sassoon. 

This came when Harris repeated the simple line: "Never give up. Never give up." It wasn't so much the familiar phrase that got to me. It was the way that Harris's voice frayed and cracked slightly on the line—reflecting the strain of weeks and months on the campaign stump. My heart swelled and broke in that moment. It was shaken with tears. 

Falling

 I dropped off to sleep around midnight with a glow of last-minute hope in my belly. I thought: "Harris is still going to win this. They just haven't counted all the absentee ballots in the Blue Wall states yet. Once they do, the numbers will shift in her favor." And I was chanting to myself "don't believe the red mirage... don't believe the red mirage..." as my eyes closed for the night. 

Then my eyes flew open again around three in the morning. And I made the mistake of checking the news. I couldn't help myself. I refreshed the New York Times homepage—to discover that Trump is now just one vote away from taking the electoral college. J.D. Vance is already on stage kissing the ass of the man he once called "America's Hitler," calling it the "political comeback" of the century. 

The National Interest

 For most of my life, I firmly believed that one could never err on the side of pleading for "restraint" in American foreign policy. I figured the self-interest of the nation was so obviously on the side of aggrandizement that no one needed to advocate further for that position. The political system would always select for the "hawks" and those bent on advancing U.S. power; so the "responsibility of intellectuals," in the Chomskyan sense, would always be to try to counteract this drive. 

What I didn't pay enough attention to was the possibility that there might be people whose personal self-interest was so at odds with the interests of the country that they might actually succeed in shifting our foreign policy toward the goals of our country's adversaries. I gave short shrift, I fear, to the risks posed by that group of individuals, whom the military historian Edward Creasy dubbed: "a body of intriguing malcontents, who were eager to purchase a party-triumph at the expense of a national disaster."

Heart's Needle

 I've reached that time in the fall semester when the invisible thread connecting me to my nephew and niece starts to pull. It's been too long since I've seen them. I even get paranoid and sad. How much have they changed in the interval? Do they even remember me? I tell myself it's only been a few months. But months make up whole percentage points of their existence to date. 

I hope my thoughts can somehow reach them across the invisible lines of connection. I remind myself of the words of Basil Bunting's heartbreaking poem, written to the son he never met: "Unseen is not unknown..." he said. But then he had to confess, in the stanza's closing lines, such consolations amounted only to "Words late, lost, dumb."

Avoidance Systems

 Back in 2018—the same year Donald Trump was carrying out his family separation policy at the border—I was doing all in my power not to think about politics. Part of it was that I had to spend every moment at work thinking and writing about Trump already (I worked at a human rights advocacy organization, after all). The rare chance when I had free time at home felt like an opportunity to detox from "the news." So on the weekends of that year, I spent an uncharacteristic amount of time reading about things like art history, which I took to be politically neutral. 

It's partly that I knew that, if I read about politics directly, it would carry me away. The first word on the subject would then exhaustingly force me to log onto this website, and write even more about it, and then I'd have to write about what I'd written, and there would be no escape. So I calculatedly confined my reading only to those things that I thought would inspire no further ideas or blogs on my part. And, to an extent, I appear to have succeeded. Looking back at this blog's timeline, I see that 2018 was the year with the fewest completed posts. 

What Happened?

 I talked last time about how Wilhelm Reich's diagnosis of the psychology of fascism still rings true in the Trump era, and I stand by it. But even more than the answers that Reich provides (to the question, that is, of what explains the rise of fascism) I find that his way of posing the question resonates with our time. In a sense, after all, Reich was asking the same question Hillary Clinton famously did, after unexpectedly losing the 2016 election by a hair: "What Happened?"

I'm talking here about the first, 1933 edition of the book—not so much the later sections that Reich added in 1942, which partake more of his usual sexual mumbo-jumbo (and which I confess I haven't finished yet). By 1942, obviously, the United States had entered the war, and the ultimate victory of democracy seemed a bit more assured. The 1933 sections—by contrast—were written fresh on the heels of Hitler's seizure of power, and therefore with much more urgency. 

Paging Dr. Freud

 Of all the theories put forward in the 1930s to explain the rise of fascism, I have to say that the psychoanalytic one always struck me as the least plausible. Most of the Freudian theses have not held up well over the decades, after all. But I have to say, after Tucker Carlson's bizarre pivot into a rant about "spanking," during a Trump rally yesterday—I'm going to have to give those theories a second look. 

Carlson's rant—as reported in the New York Times—is, it must be said, a masterpiece of its kind in the insane fulminations of the authoritarian personality. In one go, it managed to combine election denialism, a vague call to stage a putsch if Trump loses the vote on November 5, Southern "lost cause" Neo-Confederatism—and, most prominently, Tucker's own bizarre sado-masochistic incest fantasy. 

Talking Our Extinction to Death

 Over at my other blog—which tends to be more professionally geared—I published a piece a week ago about how Trump's recent rhetoric has gotten even more overtly authoritarian than it was before. I compared his words against the rhetoric of fictional dictators from literature, to argue that Trump's speeches read like someone's parody of the "bad guy" from some hypothetical dystopian future. 

I don't claim the point was original. But it was impassioned. It was witty. At some level, I feel it was the best thing I ever wrote on that blog. 

Errata and Marginalia 028: Defoe

 Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2016; originally published in 1726). 

Well! That was one of the stranger books I've ever read. I have no obvious way to account for it other than to remind us that Defoe—like many of the greatest authors in history—wrote for money. This book is padded and uneven, and meanders and loses its thread, perhaps most of all because Defoe was under a deadline and needed to keep the pot boiling. 

But what sort of book is this? In Defoe's outstanding introductory chapter, he promises us a sort of biography of Satan. He tells us that he will track the progress of the Devil's actions throughout human history—from ancient times to the present. And he does it all with a witty polemical tongue that keeps us doubting exactly how literally and in what spirit he intends us to take all this. 

Aubade

 Tonight I'd had about fifteen minutes of quasi-sleep—a lucid-dreaming welsh rabbit kind of state—when I was suddenly jolted awake in terror. The past days, weeks, months, years of steadily mounting panic about the upcoming election had suddenly concentrated to a point. There was no way out. The election is only two weeks away, as of today. Our fate cannot be delayed any further. 

And no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, the two binary outcomes of this election are roughly equally likely at this point. Two weeks from now, I am just as likely to be living in one of those two futures as the other. 

With Malice Toward None

 The New York Times was quoting yesterday a Wisconsin progressive group that is very annoyed about the extent to which Charlie Sykes has been able to reinvent himself as a mainstream moderate, in the Trump era. A decade ago, they argue, he was a couple degrees to the right of Rush Limbaugh. He was promoting election denialism before the Kraken was even a glimmer in Sidney Powell's eye. But now, just because he's anti-Trump, everyone is suddenly cool with him?

They were particularly miffed that Harris was agreeing to an interview with him. For left-wing Wisconsinites, who remember him best for his role in the ugly Scott Walker–era fights over the so-called "right to work" law, the change is particularly jarring. As they remember him, Sykes "was the shrieking voice that there was voter fraud everywhere for 10 years," a Wisconsin progressive summarizes. "Now the mainstream Democratic apparatus has embraced him because he’s right on Trump."

The Websterians

 Look, I'm obviously enough of a Democratic Establishment type that I'm voting for Kamala Harris in this election. I've donated to her campaign as well. My mind never required making up on any of that. I was on team "unite the left in a popular front to defeat Trump" as far back as 2016. And certainly nothing that has happened since then would convince me I was wrong about that. 

But I'm not such a Democratic Party hack that I would withhold all criticism of Harris's policy positions until after the election. I recognize this is somewhat in tension with what I said just yesterday. In that post, I argued that the shameless Harris stans on social media should keep the brat summer magic going for at least a few weeks more. So maybe I'm contradicting myself here...

When Will You Find Patience?

 At some point over the summer, just when we needed it to happen, the internet suddenly discovered that Kamala Harris was cool. Overnight, her approval rating went from underwater to positive. You can see the whole process unfold on 538's tracker. The purple line improbably skyrockets starting sometime in July. Simultaneously and collectively, the nation completely changed its mind. 

I'm thrilled that it happened. It made the election winnable again. But it has also always made me nervous. Since the change was so miraculous and sudden and inexplicable to start with—I've always been scared that it could evaporate and reverse just as quickly. And already, online, I feel like I'm starting to see faint signs that this is the case. 

False Situations

 No sooner had I finished my recent post about Julien Gracq's 1951 novel The Opposing Shore than tensions flared between our real-life Orsenna and Farghestan in the Pacific: by which I mean Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. This week, the PRC military engaged in an unprecedentedly aggressive set of war games, completely encircling Taiwan in what can only be seen as a dangerous sign of escalating tensions between the countries—if not a threat of something even worse (like a looming invasion). 

As you may recall, the mythic nations in Gracq's novel are engaged in a long-simmering conflict in which there are no active hostilities—but neither has peace been officially declared. In this regard, Gracq's fictional premise could be regarded as a stand-in for any number of real-world geopolitical conflicts dating from the twentieth century that have never been formally resolved: the uneasy truce between North and South Korea, say—or, to the point here, the dispute over the political status of Taiwan. 

The Lyncher's Mentality

 In a recent run-down of Trump's meandering interview before the Economic Club of Chicago, two writers for Rolling Stone describe a uniquely bizarre moment. It should go down in the history books as perhaps quintessential Trump. Rarely has there been an episode of his rhetorical bombast that so completely encapsulated his character and combined so many of his most disturbing obsessions. 

The conversation was supposed to be about Trump's economic policies, but of course, he seized every chance to instead redirect the discussion to his pet topics: crime and immigration. At one point, according to the reporters, he suddenly pointed to a woman seated in the audience. Trump said she was a "beautiful" woman, and added that immigrants coming across the border "will kill you." 

The Masks We Wear

 Earlier this week, J.D. Vance sat down for an unusual unscripted interview with the New York Times. One of the first things that piques one's curiosity, as it does in any conversation with Vance, is the question of how exactly he manages to look himself in the mirror. How can he live with himself, after completely reversing his positions and selling out his own values so many times over the course of his career? 

The interviewer's polite way of edging into this topic was to tell Vance that she was not sure, going into the discussion, "which J.D. was going to show up." He has so many chameleon shades. Vance's response to this was revealing: "Isn't that how most people are?" As in: doesn't everyone have this gnawing emptiness and void inside that makes them able to contort themselves into new forms without remorse? 

Poets of the Event

 If the American people do decide to elect Donald Trump again, three weeks from now—future historians will be hard pressed to explain why exactly we decided to throw out our democracy after two and a half centuries of relatively stable existence. Don't believe any of the would-be sociological explanations they may provide. The United States didn't suffer defeat in any major wars on the eve of Trump's re-election. There was no obvious national humiliation. We were not experiencing a recession or widespread unemployment. Our economy was growing and remained the largest in the world. 

We had our share of valid grounds for discontent, to be sure; our society was still rife with many of the same inequities and dispossessions that had plagued it for the last two-and-a-half centuries—but that doesn't explain why now, why in 2024. Nor do people's legitimate grievances about society explain why so many collectively hallucinated that a raving narcissistic demagogue would solve any of them (especially since he had not managed to solve them the previous time he was in office, and in fact had left the country worse off and had tried to stage a coup on his way out the door). 

Our Firebug Problem

 We truly do have a Firebug problem in this election. What I mean by that is: no matter how clearly Trump telegraphs his violent and authoritarian intentions, people simply will not believe him. Thus, our nation is in the same position as the protagonist Biedermann in Max Frisch's 1950s play, The Firebugs. The evidence keeps piling up in his attic that his newfound guests intend to start a conflagration. They even brought drums full of petrol and lots of matches. But he simply refuses to take the threat seriously. 

The New York Times reports today, for instance, on the surprisingly large share of Latino voters who support Trump. Most do not endorse, when asked, his plans for mass deportation. But they also insist that Trump does not really mean it. Reporter Jazmine Ullua writes that those who are aware of his pledges tend to "believe he will not go through with such actions, because he did not the first time he was in office." Ruth Igelnick adds: "40 percent said people who are offended by Trump are taking him too seriously." 

A Visit to the Unworld

 Surely one of the most embarrassing chapters in the modern history of the Left is the era when all the seemingly thoughtful and intelligent progressive writers were letting themselves be taken in by the dozens as dupes of the Stalinist regime. There is almost no worse genre of left-wing literature than the 1930s fellow-traveling memoir touting collective farms as a charming success (while somehow managing to avert their eyes to the purges, famine, and secret police standing stage left). 

One after another, these writers visited the fatherland of the socialist revolution, and they returned to the West to offer starry-eyed accounts of the progress they had seen. There were endless paeans to tractors, from people who had survived carefully stage-managed Intourist trips that offered them a guided tour only of the various Potemkin villages that the Soviet state wanted them to see. And all too many never dared to peek behind the cardboard cutouts to see what was on the other side.  

Charitable Inconsistency

 I just finished reading James Hogg's rediscovered classic, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—a Gothic novel on the theme of Protestant fanaticism that was published two hundred years ago, then forgotten for a century, until André Gide (who knew something about Protestant fanaticism) happened upon it in 1924 (the centennial year of its first publication). Since 2024 is now the novel's bicentennial, and its ghoulish elements befit the month of October, I suppose it is an appropriate time to write about it here. 

The novel works equally well as supernatural horror and a darkly comic satire on Calvinism. Put briefly, it tells the story of a man so thoroughly convinced of the truth of "absolute predestination" that he carries it to antinomian extremes. Since the justified have already been chosen from eternity for salvation, he reasons—then nothing they do in this life can possibly put their blessed future estate in jeopardy. Thus, they can sin with impunity. He therefore proceeds to commit murder and other atrocities, in the belief that no harm can ever come to the saints from their own actions. 

The Pursuit of Ignorance

 At a certain point in his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, the titular historian and Boston scion describes his attempts as a young scholar to publish an article on the subject of monetary retrenchment. In the wake of the Civil War, the U.S. government had issued a large supply of paper currency that it allowed to exceed the extent of its gold reserves. This was the country's first experiment with fiat currency, and it was highly controversial at the time—particularly among New England conservatives—because (in Adams's telling), it was seen as an affront to the idea that money has to be backstopped—ultimately—by "intrinsic value." 

Adams—as a good son of New England (albeit one whose family always had a conflicted relationship with the forces that he shorthands as "State Street," which seems to stand in—for him—for capitalism and the financial class)—initially set out to prove that the U.S. needed to follow the path of Great Britain, and pull back its money supply in peacetime until it matched the country's gold reserves. Yet, as he set about his studies, he in fact found the opposite was the case. Britain's experience in retrenching its currency, he found, had been widely regarded as a mistake. They ought to have simply let their paper money alone. 

Weird

 This summer, Tim Walz secured his status as Harris's inevitable VP pick by delivering his immortal diagnosis of the Trump-Vance campaign: "These guys are weird." It was all-but universally conceded to be a great line—one that defined the campaign going forward. As messaging, it was brilliant. It got us out of the high-minded, lofty rhetoric that had already worn thin for people, and risked becoming a cliché, and brought us back to some awareness of the gut-level ick factor that Trump and Vance evoke. 

But there's also a potential problem with it. Namely—who ever said being weird was a bad thing? A lot of Americans bear the term with a sense of pride. Molly Ball, writing for the Wall Street Journal, profiled a big-tent right-wing conspiracist event this week, bringing together every possible variety of crank, eccentric, and oddball in the country, and she notes that many of them treated being "weird" as a badge of honor. "I consider myself a weirdo," one of them told her—in a particularly telling line. 

Cloister, Father of the Cat People

 Shortly after J.D. Vance set loose his bogus (and dangerously racist) urban legend about Haitian immigrants supposedly eating cats, it was not long before the memes started appearing on right-wing social media riffing on the theme. Several of them asserted some version of: "Kamala Harris hates cats." 

I found this odd, since just a few weeks earlier, Vance had been much in the news for calling Harris a "childless cat-lady" in a 2021 podcast. So which one was it? Is she a cat lady? Or does she detest the animal? One can say many things of someone you accuse of being a "cat lady"—but surely being anti-cat is not one of them? 

Madness!

 In the otherwise dry and policy-oriented vice presidential debate that just concluded, there was one absolutely jaw-dropping moment. This occurred when Walz got around to asking J.D. Vance point-blank whether he conceded that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

This was a great strategy on Walz's part. Vance, throughout the night, was trying to portray himself as a reasonable and moderate person—not someone who was living in an alternative epistemic universe from the rest of us. And yet, as Donald Trump's running mate, he cannot explicitly disavow the former president's most bananas claims about things; they are, after all, the official positions of his campaign. The best Vance can do, when these things come up, is to ignore, downplay, and dodge. 

(in a chair)

 At one point in his Metaphysics, Aristotle discusses the sorts of "puzzles" with which this branch of philosophy is concerned. He mentions, by way of example, the problem of "whether Socrates and Socrates seated are the same." (Reeve translation throughout.)

I was immediately reminded of an episode from my childhood. A friend and I were playing the Star Wars Trivial Pursuit board game. He asked me a question from one of the cards that was decisive for whether or not I would win the game. The question was something like: "Whom does Luke levitate by using the Force on the Forest Moon of Endor?" 

The Terrible People

 Blogger and Substacker Freddie deBoer published a rant this morning taking aim at the type of Gen X high-achiever who feels the need to constantly deprecate their own success and remind us that—even though they have collected all the brass rings of life—"those kinds of things don't really matter to me." 

DeBoer's point is that, if people are going to be better and more successful than us at everything, they should at least have the decency to brag about it. Having taken everything else from us, why can't they let us have the moral superiority, if nothing else? Do they really need to win the "most humble" prize too? 

The Oracles

 In one of his early works, the French writer René Guénon attributes the following observation to Leibniz: "every [philosophical] system is true in what it affirms and false in what it denies." (Pallis trans.)

Which is fascinating—because it strikes me that the exact opposite is the case. Pace Leibniz (if he did in fact say this), every system is false in what it affirms, and true in what it denies. 

What I mean by this is that philosophy has proven to be an excellent tool for destruction. Every philosopher is correct so long as they are demolishing the positive assertions of others. But as soon as they start trying to build up constructive systems of their own, they immediately turn deceptive. 

"Were it proved he lies..."

 We are now weeks into the J.D. Vance-smearing-Haitian-immigrants story, and the GOP vice presidential nominee is still refusing to acknowledge the mountain of evidence that proves his "pet-eating" claim to be nothing more than a racist slander. He refuses to walk it back. He seems to be just utterly immune to appeals to conscience, integrity, honesty, or any shred of honor in politics. 

What's so eerie and sociopathic about his behavior, after all, is that Vance not only spread an intrinsically-implausible and stigmatizing rumor that smacked of racist urban legends—but that he continued to promote it even after local officials told him point-blank that the story was a fabrication. He continued to promote it even after his lie sparked multiple bomb threats that upended life in the city he had targeted. He continued to promote it even after the governor of his state and city officials urged him to stop. He even went on TV and congratulated himself for saying it. 

A Strange Fashion of Forsaking

 Like the rest of the nation, I have been deluged with headlines in recent days about North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson's bizarre reported history of offensive remarks. Of course, Robinson claims that the stories are false—he says he never wrote the posts that have been tied to his name. He alleges his Democratic opponent in the race planted these reports in an attempt to smear his reputation. 

Yet, Robinson quickly undermined his own claim by calling the story "lies from fifteen years ago." If they were entirely concocted by his Democratic opponent in the current race, though—how could they actually be that old? Indeed, it seems so likely at this point that Robinson did in fact say all the things he is accused of saying, that even those inveterate liars Trump and Vance are not repeating his counter-allegations. 

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities: A Review

 I just finished Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, and I have emerged convinced that the modern-day revisionists are right: this once most reviled and misunderstood Melville novel is actually among his best. 

But why is it so effective? The back cover of the Penguin Classics edition informs me the novel is to be read as a "satire on the Gothic-Sentimental novel." But I'm not sure that's quite right. 

Pierre certainly has some themes in common with other more overt satires and parodies of the Gothic romance, such as Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. Like those works, Pierre is fundamentally a critique of people who insist upon making themselves and others miserable through pursuing phantasms and hobbyhorses of the mind. 

Why Not Say What Happened?

 The next stop in the presidential campaign is the October 1 VP debate between Vance and Walz, and I'm already cringing with trepidation. Now, I don't doubt that Walz will continue to come across to the American people as an infinitely more likable and sympathetic character than Vance. But I do know that Vance is going to bring up yet again the handful of discrepancies in Walz's past accounts of himself that he has tried to make so much hay of on the campaign trail.

"You said you and your wife used IVF," Vance will say. "But you actually used some other kind of fertility treatment." (And why does this distinction matter? Because Republicans are only trying to ban the former kind. But wait—they aren't trying to ban that either, according to Trump and Vance. So, how can it serve them to bring up this distinction? No matter, Vance will bring it up anyways.) Or he'll say: "You said you carried weapons of war—but you were never in a combat role."

Sacred Trust

 Even by the standards of the always-horrendous war in the Middle East, which has consumed the region for the past year, there was something particularly gruesome—that sticks in the memory—about the attack using exploding pagers and walkie-talkies this week in Lebanon. Imagine these micro-explosions suddenly going off around you, all over the country, and having no idea what was causing them or how to avoid them. My heart broke upon reading the stories of people unplugging TVs and computers from their walls, because they simply had no idea what might go up in flames next. 

I get that Hezbollah officials are a legitimate military target. They are engaged in active hostilities against Israel, launching frequent attacks that have internally displaced thousands of civilians from the country's north. But the "exploding pager" tactic was almost certain to sweep in countless innocent people who had nothing to do with the militant group and its activities. It is the essence of an indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, taking insufficient care to protect noncombatants. The New York Times tells one story of a nine-year-old girl who picked up her father's pager when it beeped, in order to bring it to him. It exploded in her hand, killing her. 

The Ethics of Deterrence

 Well here we are again: once more living amidst the "chafe and jar/ Of nuclear war," as Robert Lowell put it in the early 1960s. Our moment of peril might not be quite as extreme as his—but it could certainly escalate to a similar fever pitch, depending on the actions of the various governments involved. Lowell even wrote that the rumors of nuclear confrontation in his era had lasted "All autumn"—and so too, we are experiencing another nuclear fall.  

I'm referring to Putin's recent response to the possibility that the U.S. and the UK may approve the Ukrainian use of long-range weapons to fire on the interior of Russia. Putin expressly declared that he would consider this an act of war by the NATO powers. And while he didn't mention nuclear weapons specifically, the implication was clear: he was reminding the British and American authorities that they were confronting a nuclear-armed power. 

Musical Banks

 I was reading Samuel Butler's Erewhon this week, and came to the section of the protagonist's travels in which his Erewhonian hosts conduct him to a mysterious building called the "Musical Bank." The building—an imposing and beautifully-wrought edifice, with stained-glass windows—is one for which all the inhabitants of Erewhon profess the highest esteem. They all become offended if anyone insults these institutions in their presence. They all claim to aspire to want to attend these buildings regularly. 

And yet, the narrator notices, they seldom actually deposit their money in these banks. The inhabitants of Erewhon, he observes, actually use a system of dual-currency. One currency—the hard one—is what they employ for their daily transactions. It is the only one in which they will accept real payment in ordinary economic life. The second currency—which the narrator describes as a kind of "toy money," is that which they deposit in the Musical Banks. It does not appear to be good for anything else. 

Take Defeat

 Look, we're all nervous about this upcoming presidential debate. Not so much because we fear Harris would do a bad job. But just because: we all remember what happened the last time around. We are all still traumatized from Biden's performance in July. That debate, as we all recall, was so abysmal that it utterly reshaped the election. It forced Biden to end his candidacy. In short, it marked his defeat. And so, it was a day that reminded us all that very bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes, that is, the bad guys win the round. 

I was thinking yesterday in this regard about the triumph of evil and mediocrity in the world: how the J.D. Vances of the world succeed where better people fail. I was reminded of a line from Yeats, in which he advises the noble failure to simply accept obscurity as the price of having kept their honor. "Be secret and exult," he bids them. And when I went back to look up the poem in full, I was struck by how perfectly it described the entire experience of that first July debate. Indeed, it could have been written to console Biden in the failure of his election hopes.

A Pot of Sack

 How fortunate is our generation that we have the first intellectual vice presidential candidate in many a year! Of course, that venerable term does not mean all it once did. In yesteryear, it connoted a certain wide range of reading and broad exposure to many ideas. Now, when we say "intellectual," we mostly appear to mean that someone has read a few blogs, and come away with one idea, which they have since held on to like a vise. 

Today's intelligentsia, after all, consists of people who learned just enough philosophy in undergrad to label themselves "effective altruists," and then to move, by a circuitous path, from this belief to a worship of a superpowerful computerized deity called "The Singularity," and then to move from that, by a path still more circuitous, to becoming fascists. 

Listen, Biedermann!

 It will be very hard to explain to future generations why, in the democratic West, there was still so much debate—as late as 2024—as to Vladimir Putin's motives in Eastern Europe. For more than a decade, we've watched him hive off little pieces of all his neighbors, one by one, under a variety of pretexts. Then, fulfilling everyone's direst and seemingly most hyperbolic predictions, he one day up and invaded one of them outright. If anyone was still protesting in January 2022 that Putin had no ambitions beyond settling a variety of ambiguous territorial disputes at his borders, one would have thought that the events of the next month would have shut them up. But no... the same people are still at it; still making the same case!

The equivalent here with regard to domestic politics would be January 6. Before that fateful day in 2021, people might have said, "Oh, Trump will probably accept the results of the election. All these liberals saying he wants to be a dictator are overstating the case. They are engaged in typical partisan exaggeration." And these voices would have had precedent on their side. After all, all the previous presidents, no matter how bombastic or demagogic, had accepted the results of the democratic process. They might have huffed and puffed, but they stepped aside in the end. So people were entitled to predict that Trump would do the same. Yet, January 6 should have settled that debate once and for all. 

Hash Brown Potatoes

 The strangest thing about the J.D. Vance obsession with childless adults—the aspect that won him the monicker "weird" that has lasted so well in this election—is that it seems so arbitrary. He has wormed his way into our private lives in the role of self-appointed judgmental relative. But we are not related to him. He has decreed standards for us that he thinks we ought to live up to. But we have no idea where these standards come from—or who he even is. We are like: "Excuse me; do I know you, sir?" 

There is something Kafkaesque about suddenly being condemned for failing to abide by someone else's arbitrary standards of social conformity—ones that we never agreed to honor in the first place. I was reading Ionesco's absurdist one-act play Jack, or The Submission the other night, and it captures this feeling perfectly. Jack, the central figure of the play, is hounded by relatives for a variety of mysterious and incomprehensible sins. He seems, for unclear reasons, to have let everyone down. 

Alleles/Memes

 I was thinking back today to a post I wrote on this blog years ago. It doesn't matter which one now. The point is just—it reminded me: some of the stuff I write here is actually pretty good. Quite good, even. I'm the equal of Ezra Klein or whoever the writer-hero of the moment may be. All those other diligent bloggers who started out spewing their thoughts into the void somewhere and were, for some reason, plucked from obscurity—I'm just as good as them. So why has the hand of fate not chosen me to be elevated as well? 

It could be that the stuff I write is not actually as good as I think. And indeed, a lot of the stuff on this blog is indefensible. A lot of it is just an excuse to string together quotes from various things I've read. But—don't people see the gems poking through? Can't they see through the accumulated dross? I know some people do. The handful of people who've read the blog at any length have all—at one time or another—found something here that spoke to them. They've read a post that touched them or a sentence that seemed to them to have been phrased just right. I too have penned my contribution to the lip-smacking mot juste. 

The Pity of War

 In his classic essay, "Notes on Nationalism," George Orwell writes that it is a hallmark of the nationalist mindset that one always condemns the atrocities of the other side of a conflict—while managing not even to hear about the atrocities committed by one's own side. 

Crucially, Orwell's concept of nationalism extended far beyond simple jingoistic patriotism or blinkered devotion to one's own country. One can also be a "nationalist," in Orwell's sense, on behalf of an ideology, or of a party to a conflict with whom one feels some other kind of moral affinity. 

Reparations

 The Boston Globe ran a headline the other day that should make anyone in this country queasy. Surveying the financial wherewithal of current members of Congress, the paper found that lawmakers whose ancestors had been slaveholders had a disproportionately higher net worth than those whose did not. 

The finding provides anecdotal but nonetheless unsettling evidence that slavery—more than a century and a half after its end—is still conferring unjust advantages on the people whose ancestors practiced it. The notion undercuts in the most troubling way our default belief in meritocracy.

Hot Mics

 At some point during the early pandemic, after we had all made the transition to living our professional lives on Zoom, the horror stories started pouring in. There were the YouTube videos, say, telling the cautionary tale of a white collar worker who forgot her camera was still on, and who proceeded to use the toilet in the middle of a staff meeting. Not to speak of the notorious Toobin incident. 

Some of the YouTube videos were probably staged. But, whether real or fake, they spoke to a genuine nightmare we all shared—the terror of exposure. The Toobin affair, which was all too real, likewise stuck in our minds because it spoke to our own deepest anxieties. We mocked and ostracized Toobin not because we could not relate to his error—but, to the contrary, because it seemed all too close to us. 

Incomprehensible

 One late night in Somerville, years ago, I turned down all the lights and put on Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. I even managed to finish it, somehow. It was the most excruciatingly boring piece of arthouse cinema I'd ever forced myself to watch, just for the sake of saying I had done so. 

Even once I made it to end, however, the victory felt hollow. I realized that there were few bragging rights to be won simply from having viewed it, start to finish. Anyone could do that. I felt I ought to have been sophisticated enough that have "gotten something out of it" too. But what? 

Let's Not, Please

 A friend of mine with more stamina than I have stayed up for the Hillary Clinton speech on the first night of the DNC. He described a moment—which was also noted by the media—when the crowd started chanting "Lock him up," referring to Donald Trump. Clinton didn't lead the chant or join in (as Trump would have done). But she didn't make a point of hushing the crowd, either. Instead, she gave a strained smile, in my friend's telling, that effectively gave them permission to continue. The press portrayed the moment as her "revenge" on Trump for initiating the "lock her up" chant eight years ago. 

I really hate to see the Democratic Party go the direction of normalizing this sort of thing. I get that it is all part of the current strategy. After choosing to hold the moral high ground for several election cycles, today's Democrats appear to have decided that this simply doesn't work. You have to fight fire with fire. As one party strategist told Politico, Michelle Obama's famous counsel, "When they go low, we go high," has been replaced in effect with a new dictum: "When they go low, we go with the flow." In other words, Democrats have chosen to echo Republicans' appeals to the lowest common denominator. 

An Army of Mercenaries

 As the Ukraine-Russia war took another fatal turn this week—with Ukraine now occupying a piece of Russian territory—I found myself thinking back to the short-lived moment, roughly a year ago, when we thought this conflict might actually be about to end. It was at that point that Putin's one-time stooge, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led a short-lived mutiny that looked for a day or two like it might actually result in a full-scale coup. 

Of course, even if Prigozhin had succeeded in removing Putin from power, that would be no guarantee he would end the war. As the leader of the vile mercenary force, the Wagner Group, Prigozhin was no humanitarian or friend to Ukraine. Still, his willingness to oppose Putin, when no one else dared, made him seem a suddenly more interesting figure. And his horrific murder, a few months later (we're coming up this week on the one-year anniversary of his death), granted him a tragic luster. 

Errata and Marginalia 027: Tuten

 Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World (New York, NY, William Morrow and Company, 1993).

The novel may come across at first as another too-cute postmodern experiment. It has all the earmarks of its genre: high and low culture mixed together, a pastiche of literary styles, a framing device drawn from pop culture that is used to explore highbrow themes (similar to Robert Coover's fabulist technique in a book like, say, A Political Fable)—all interlarded with a sense of irony. 

In a world that has been taken over by postmodernism, much of this seems less interesting now than it did in the '70s-'90s. After all, we are all postmodernists now. Default educated opinion is culturally omnivorous, and no longer finds it shocking to juxtapose a children's cartoon with characters from Thomas Mann. We all unthinkingly engage in the same kind of bricolage each day. 

The Bends, Revisited

 After my regrettable COVID diagnosis earlier this week, I decided on the spur of the moment to re-engineer my week's travel plans. I had originally intended to fly home yesterday. But, as the day approached, and I still felt awful, I decided I should spare myself that experience (and the world my germs). I therefore rearranged my flight reservation so that I'd fly home a week later. 

This meant I suddenly had an extra week to myself at my family's place in Wyoming. I genuinely believed—as I say—that I would need this time to recuperate. But I won't deny that I was also sort of looking forward to it. I would suddenly have far more space to myself than I usually have at home. And, by coincidence, I had something in my schedule I had not had in year: a genuinely free week. 

Don't Tread on My Gemeinschaft

 I just finished reading Sándor Márai's classic novel Embers this week. I will say nothing of the book's suspenseful plot—which mostly unfolds in the form of a reminiscence, over the course of a single long conversation that fills the book's final two-thirds. What I most wanted to reflect on was the nature of the author's famous nostalgia for the world he depicts. The book is set in the time it was written—the 1940s, in the midst of the second world war—but it is told largely through the memories of a man who belongs to an earlier time. The aged general at the center of the story is a product of the pre-war world: the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the period before either of the twentieth century's two global conflagrations. 

When we look for the reasons why Márai's protagonist recalls this epoch as such an idyll, we discover that it is largely because he sees it as a Gemeinschaft—the sort of community governed by disinterested ideals and "natural will," in the terminology of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies—that precedes the modern society or "Gesellschaft" that is governed through relations of mutual self-interest (what Tönnies calls the "rational will"). Márai's depiction of the loyal servant Nini and her relationship to the old general seems straight from the pages of Tönnies, for instance. 

Once Lost Always Lost?

 Well, it's finally happened. After four and a half years of a global pandemic, I've just had my first positive COVID test. As soon as I poured in the sample dropper, the "test" line turned red. I sat there patiently for fifteen minutes hoping it would go away. But it did not... Oh well; it could be worse. So far, it's been a fairly mild case. Two days in and with a waning fever, I'm probably already past the worst of it. I've been vaccinated and boosted twice or thricely. So the odds are in my favor that this will not be an especially severe illness. 

The worst of it, then, is not so much the symptoms—but simply the fact of having gotten infected. I have had to part with a certain foolish pride. There was some part of me that liked the sense that I had lasted all this time without succumbing. I knew rationally, of course, that my lack of infection did not mean I was smarter or more careful than other people. There is an incurable element of randomness to this and every pandemic. But, secretly, I still felt a certain snooty self-complacency in having made it through the whole crisis COVID-free. 

Neoliberals

 Recently, Freddie deBoer wrote a piece reviving the dispute between Matt Yglesias–style "neoliberals" and the Old Left position on social policy. It's an argument that has been happening in roughly the same form (and even between the same bloggers) since I was in college more than ten years ago. As deBoer summarizes the "neoliberal" position (used in a very specific sense here—not to be conflated with economic "neoliberalism" writ large, necessarily, though it has features in common with it), it essentially holds that the political left should pursue a pro-growth economic strategy—even if it means making common cause with Republicans in backing deregulation and gutting organized labor. Then—after this growth has taken place—the left should focus on redistributing the proceeds. It is at this second stage—the "redistribution" as opposed to "production" stage—that progressive social policy can finally kick into gear. 

I don't know if Matt Yglesias would accept this characterization of his position. But even if he is an imperfect avatar of this "neoliberal" ideology, it certainly exists out there. Obama administration officials back in the day used to talk about "expanding the pie." The idea was essentially the same as the one deBoer characterizes as the neoliberal position: they were saying that the Democratic Party needs to embrace many of the same policies as the Republicans—deregulation, a de-unionized workforce—for the sake of rapid growth; because once the "pie" of economic prosperity is large enough, there can then be a bigger slice available for everyone, after it has been partially redistributed through generous social programs. 

The Wrong Kind of Pity

 I was trying to explain to my parents the other day exactly what it is I find so distasteful about legal practice. They were quizzing me on a number of potential legal careers that I might once have entertained—trying to uncover why I had soured on them. The best I could do was to tell them that every form of legal practice I had yet encountered—including the reputedly more "idealistic" ones, such as civil rights law or environmental law—still involve winners and losers. You are therefore almost always making someone else's life on the other side significantly worse. 

Even if the person you are suing is the scum of the Earth, therefore—even if they are Rudy Giuliani, say—you nonetheless have to be the sort of person who is comfortable with ruining someone's life. You have to believe that Rudy Giuliani is so utterly without redeeming value that you do not mind financially destroying a human being. And you not only need to believe that about Rudy Giuliani—you also have to believe it about a large enough group of adversaries that you can find enough of them to sue to last you for the course of an entire legal career. 

Size Matters

 Trump continued to express his idiosyncratic obsession with crowd sizes today. After disputing for days whether the number of attendees at Harris's political rallies was really as large as she claimed, he has now upped the ante. After the media shared videos of the large groups at Harris events, Trump baselessly asserted that the Harris campaign must have doctored this photographic evidence with AI—in order to make the crowds look bigger than they were. 

This has been a long-standing obsession on Trump's part. As longtime observers of his political career will recall, it was a dispute over crowd sizes that led to the coining of the phrase "alternative facts," which has played such a large role in defining the post-truth era of American politics that Trump created. And it was in part his fondness for crowd events that fueled Trump's paranoid opposition to COVID-era restrictions on mass gatherings. 

In Praise of the Hananiahs

 The New York Times ran a fascinating interview with Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma yesterday. In the course of the discussion, Lankford made clear in a thousand ways that—despite being a Republican—he is not Donald Trump. He held Trump responsible for tanking the bipartisan border deal that Lankford negotiated earlier this year. He acknowledged that the only reason Trump opposed the legislation is that he was worried it might actually solve a problem, in the eyes of the public, and would thereby hand Democrats a victory in an election year. In other words, the bill died for reasons of rank politics, rather than sound policy. (Meanwhile, I too oppose the bill—but not for reasons that matter to either political party at this point. I am still quaint enough to believe in asylum; that was my problem with it.)

Lankford also acknowledged that Trump does and says things we would never do himself. Lankford said that he supports in principle the idea of asylum—i.e., that the United States should be a place of refuge for the oppressed. "There are people that are asylees that are fleeing from injustice around the world," he said, adding: "We don’t want to ever lose [that] in America[.]" When asked about Trump's stated ambition to carry out "mass deportations" of all undocumented people in the country, Lankford made no attempt to defend this policy goal. Instead, he observed that Trump would almost certainly never be able to pull it off in practice. He would start by deporting people with pending orders of removal; but if he tried to circumvent due process for everyone else, "[a] court would stop that immediately."

Ignoble Lies

 It's no surprise that J.D. Vance has launched his opening salvo in the VP wars with a completely misleading and dishonest attack on his counterpart on the rival ticket. After all, dishonesty is baked into his chosen ideology. 

A friend of mine with more contacts in Silicon Valley circles than I have was giving me the low-down the other day on the key intellectual influences (if that's the term) on the Peter Thiel tech-fascist circles to which Vance belongs. It appears they have primarily modeled themselves on the Nazi theoretician Carl Schmitt (whose reputation, it must be said, the illiberal academic postmodern leftists have also revived—so we can't exclusively blame the conservatives for this one) and on the political philosopher and Plato scholar Leo Strauss. Or rather, on Leo Strauss as interpreted through various right-wing neo-monarchist bloggers, which may have very little to do with the actual Leo Strauss—I haven't read enough of his work to say. 

The Mask of Civilization

 Seeing the images of the race riots that broke out across the UK last week, it's hard not to agree with the poet John Berryman's dire assessment: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery." In the sight of the balaclava-clad mobs hurling bricks at mosques and trying to set fire to hotels full of people—because they reportedly housed asylum-seekers—we have the type and image of every torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mob throughout history, hunting for witches to burn. We see that the same patterns of communal violence repeat themselves at the slightest pretext, in every society. In short, we find that the mask of civilization rests ever so lightly on the face—and is in perpetual danger of slipping off. 

It is tempting, when confronted with this spectacle, to cite theorists of crowd psychology to explain it. Elias Canetti and Gustave Le Bon both wrote that one of the default ur-forms of the mob is the pack organized for hunting. The ginned-up mob searching for an outsider to lynch is—sadly—one of the oldest and most frequently-recurring features of history. But what makes the UK riots fit so well into the familiar patterns of communal violence is that they were sparked by reports of a crime. This, indeed, is the script of every major wave of ethnic violence or pogroms. Hindu persecution of Muslim minorities in Gujarat; Kyrgyz pogroms against Uzbek minorities; Rakhine violence against the Rohingya in Burma; the anti-Black Tulsa riots in the U.S.—they all followed this pattern. 

Berkeley's God

 The more I read George Berkeley, the more it seems to me we might have skipped all the rest of modern philosophy and just left it with him. Here, after all—at the dawn of modern philosophy—we find already disclosed the key insights of the Kantian and the logical positivist systems alike. 

Indeed, Berkeley was perhaps one step ahead of Kant. The latter's great "Copernican Revolution" was to discover that the whole structure of reality and its apparent laws of uniformity could be rescued from skepticism, if it be recast simply as a structure of the mind—belonging to the realm of phenomena. 

Whitehead

 Was Whitehead simply a crank? Surely not. There are long sections in his lecture series, Science and the Modern World, in which he proves that he can write clearly when he wants to. He demonstrates that he is more than capable of articulating a coherent thought if he chooses. To be sure, these passages tend to appear when he is explaining some philosophical problem. When he is setting up the difficulty for us, he makes it all perfectly lucid. But then, when it comes time to reveal the solution, he suddenly becomes downright Delphic in his inscrutability. 

In the course of the lectures, after all, Whitehead addresses most of the familiar problems of modern philosophy. He points to Hume's problem of induction, for instance. He observes that it is rather odd that, at the very dawn of modern science, Hume managed to refute the very premises on which inductive science is based. He says that it is perhaps ironic that modern scientists have all embraced Hume's philosophy—and admit his objections to the philosophical foundations of empirical inquiry to be unanswerable—and yet have proceeded on their way as if these objections did not exist. 

J.D. Vance in the Gesellschaft

 The New York Times ran a follow-up report earlier this week on the "childless Americans" story. In this piece, they confronted even more directly the social conservative argument I was worrying about last week. As you may recall, I wrote at the time that conservatives like Vance would almost certainly interpret the decision of many American young adults to pass on raising children as a "selfish" choice. 

And indeed, the follow-up article from the Times cites several conservative commentators making exactly this claim. The article quotes one Fox News host, for instance, as saying that young people are choosing not to reproduce because "They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace [sic] of fulfillment[.]"

YgUDuh

 We have entered the season of general election pandering in earnest now; and so, we are treated to the sight of Democrats falling over themselves to out-Republican the Republicans on crime and the border. We see Harris burnishing her credentials as a prosecutor; Harris reaffirming that she will keep Biden's anti-asylum order in place; Harris claiming—with one eye on Pennsylvania—that she always supported fracking. And we also, for some reason, all have to pay obeisance to the idea that we hate Nippon Steel. 

Now the Democratic governor of must-win swing-state Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, is also weighing in on this subject. The New York Times reports that he is the latest Democratic leader to go public with his opposition to the acquisition of U.S. Steel by a Japanese company. It's easy to see the political calculus behind his stance. What's harder to understand is exactly why the deal is supposed to be bad. No one has yet pointed to any concerns about Nippon Steel's management or its commitment to U.S. workers. 

Leave Netrebko Alone!

 The New York Times ran a piece today about Anna Netrebko's return to the American opera for the first time since Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Predictably, the same individuals who sought to blacklist her from the stage earlier—due to her alleged affinities with Putin and her inadequate condemnation of the war—are criticizing the Palm Beach Opera's decision to host her. I cannot agree with them. 

It's always struck me that there is something distinctly distasteful about the campaign to ban Netrebko from performing in the United States. Now, I detest Putin and his war as much as anyone—and I honestly don't know enough about Netrebko's previous comments on the subject to defend them. But her manager makes a good point in the article that she hasn't returned to Russia since the start of the war. 

Marginal Types

 Noah Smith had a column the other day in which he argued that most Universal Basic Income (UBI) advocates are wrong on the facts. First of all, he observed, it's not obvious that most Americans actually want to be relieved of their duties in the work force. Many people report a surprisingly high degree of job satisfaction. Their work is a source of meaning and social value in their lives, and they are not looking to escape it. 

But, the UBI advocates often retort: whether they want to continue working or not—they will very soon have no choice in the matter. AI and other forms of automation are coming for our jobs. And so, we will all have to get used to living off of UBI checks or starve. (One thing I've never understood about this hypothesis: what guarantees that our tech overlords will continue sending those checks indefinitely? No matter—Smith was making a different point.)

Strategic Ambiguity

 I was listening to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast's coverage of the RNC the other week, and they made an interesting point that the issue of Ukraine was strangely absent from the convention. If someone were teleported to our world without any knowledge of our geopolitical context, they might even come away from the RNC without knowing that this conflict exists. To be sure, a few hardline isolationists (Tucker, for one, obviously couldn't resist) went off-teleprompter to deliver some pro-Putin talking points. But, for the most part, people simply tried not to mention the subject. Israel, by contrast, was foregrounded repeatedly on almost every night. 

The podcast hosts speculated that this was due to the fact that "Israel unites the Republican Party, whereas Ukraine divides it"—and so, the platform speakers had decided to emphasize the former and simply not to mention the latter. The hosts also observed that the exact inverse situation prevails among the Democrats. Ukraine unites the party; whereas Israel divides it. Thus, they prognosticated, at the DNC in August, we will probably be hearing a great deal about Ukraine but almost nothing about Israel. 

More Selfish Than I

 Today, in the midst of the nation's ongoing controversy about childlessness (prompted by some downright hate speech on the subject that resurfaced in an old J.D. Vance interview), the New York Times decided to run an article profiling the reasons why some adults are choosing not to have children. The rationales they cite, in the article's telling, mostly relate to their fears of the negative impact kids might have on their personal freedom and lifestyle. Many, the article says, expressed that they were "worried about how a child would affect their identity and their choices." 

The article was not necessarily unsympathetic, but I nonetheless tensed up when I read it. I could almost see the neuronal connections lighting up in J.D. Vance's brain, if he ever saw it. He would be too chastened this week to utter the thought that would almost certainly come to mind—after spending the last several days trying to walk back his earlier comments about "childless cat ladies"—but he would surely think it. The word would march through his consciousness in big neon letters: "Selfish!" he would think. "That's the reason they're not having kids. They're selfish!"

Laws for Themselves and Not for Me

 Childless people are having a miniature news cycle devoted to us this week, after J.D. Vance's mean-spirited comments on the subject from a 2021 interview resurfaced in the context of Harris's election campaign. The remarks, in which Vance suggested that all childless women are "miserable cat ladies," prompted many people on the internet to leap to the defense of people who—whether by choice or by force of circumstance—currently do not have biological offspring. 

You might expect me to feel vindicated by this. But to be honest, I have spent so much time feeling insecure about living outside of a conventional romantic partnership, I'd almost forgotten that, even if you have a partner, people then judge you for not having children with your partner. And then, if you do have a child, you still have to hear from the "you're not a real parent until you have two children" brigade. In short, it never ends. Social conformity is an infinite treadmill. 

The Genetic Drift of Ideology

 In his efforts to build a Republican political coalition that can get him reelected, Trump has often resorted to appeals to naked self-interest. "You may not like my style," he seems to be saying—"but I will deliver the goods." Oil and gas companies, he says, should back him because he is going to "drill, baby, drill," as soon as he returns to office. Wealthy CEOs should donate to his campaign, he points out, because he is going to lower corporate tax rates even further if he wins the election. 

These shameless acts of political bribery (which, incidentally, put the lie to the supposed "populism" of Trump's campaign) don't work in every instance. Some CEOs leave these meetings feeling insulted at the notion that they can be bought so easily. But, in all too many cases, Trump's strategy has worked precisely as intended. He has managed to land some surprisingly big game by the simple technique of saying: "you will make even more money if you back me for president." (Or, as in the case of erstwhile GOP critics, such as Nikki Haley, he has been able to say: "If you want to have any political future in this party, you'd better fall in line." And that, too, appears to have worked.)

Echoes in the Abyss

 After Elon completed his acquisition of Twitter, I mostly checked out of the platform for a while. I was too disgusted by Musk's arrogance and childish behavior. I couldn't see wanting to use my time to sustain any project associated with him, however infinitesimal my contribution might be. I was probably away from the platform, then, for a good year at least. And my mental health probably improved as a result. 

But then, like so many commentators and activists before me, I came crawling shamefacedly back. I simply found that there was no replacement for it. The various Twitter clones that had been attempted simply did not have the network effects in place to make them plausible competitors. And so, if I wanted to continue to promote my work to at least some of the relevant audience, at least some of the time, I had to swallow my pride and use Twitter (*cough* "X"). 

Save the Whales

 The recent arrest of a prominent anti-whaling activist has put the controversial tactics of these campaigners back into the headlines. I, predictably, am of two minds on the subject. On the one hand, whales are complex, intelligent creatures capable of forming strong social attachments. Killing them is inhumane under any circumstances—and the fact that human beings have hunted them nearly to extinction at various points of history is an atrocity. In principle, then, I support whatever nonviolent tactics might protect them—even tactics that some perceive as annoying and self-righteous. 

Yet, this tentative endorsement of the tactics of these campaigners depends on their strategy actually working—and some of the available evidence suggests that it can actually prove counterproductive. Particularly when the anti-whaling activism is seen as a form of cultural imperialism or chauvinism, it can backfire, and end up stoking an increase in exactly the activity it aims to combat. 

Nihilation

 It's always struck me that there is an odd logical inconsistency in the right-wing position on most culture war issues. After all, the current conservative talking point about Trans identity is that it is somehow "impossible." Someone assigned the male sex at birth simply cannot become a woman—according to conservatives—by some sort of fixed natural law. But, if this is so—if the thing they fear cannot actually happen anyways—then why are they so up in arms about it? 

One heard a version of the same thing a decade ago or so, when mainstream conservatives were still fighting the same-sex marriage battle. Right-wingers would say things like "marriage is between a man and a woman." And often, if pressed on this, they would explain that they meant this as a descriptive as much as a normative statement. Marriage between two women, or between two men, they claimed, simply could not happen. It was a contradiction in terms. It was a kind of ontological impossibility. 

Ye Hypocrites

 The horrific attempted assassination of Donald Trump a week ago today led to predictable accusations from Republicans that Democrats and liberals, by engaging in fierce rhetoric against Trump's candidacy, had somehow caused this violence. And while I find this take annoying, it is far from the worst possible form that the conservative response could have taken. I would prefer this accusation to conspiracy theories alleging that Democratic leadership literally plotted to abet the assassination (which I feared at first would be the knee-jerk Trumpist response). 

And the allegation that Democrats "caused" the assassination attempt, by their vehement criticism of Trump's record and policy agenda, may have even had a beneficial indirect effect. It led to a sort of de-escalatory arms race, in which both parties competed with each other—at least for a few days—to see who could "lower the temperature" fastest and reclaim the moral high ground by offering a message of "unity" (though Trump appears to have officially called an end to the truce, with his return to extremist and demagogic rhetoric at his RNC speech). 

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Trump

For the past eight years I have searched for the perfect literary analogy for the Trump era. I thought perhaps I had found it in Robert Coover's postmodern fable about the Cat in the Hat running for president. I thought maybe the top contender was Alfred Jarry's play about an infantile pleasure-principle-dominated tyrant, Ubu Roi. But now, at last, I have a nominee for the prize that tops them both: George Saunders's 2005 satirical novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. 

The book was written and published in the midst of the George W. Bush administration. And I suppose it could be read—and probably was read at the time—as a commentary on the national chauvinism and arrogance the country displayed in the era of the Iraq War. But, what is profoundly eerie about reading it now is how much more directly it seems to speak to our own time—almost two decades later—than the one in which it was written. 

Tell Possum

 Last night's news flash—about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—is surely the moral nadir of what has already been an immensely depressing campaign season. It may also be the one moment—more than any other in the Trump era—that truly dooms American democracy. Not only did the would-be assassin's bullets take the life of an innocent bystander and severely injure another; they also came within an inch of ending the life of one of the two major party contenders by violence. Nothing could be more destabilizing of our democratic system. 

The whole purpose of a democratic election is to resolve our political differences by peaceful means. As Elias Canetti described it, we substitute the invisible "army" of a voting majority for the real-life army of a civil war faction. We agree to settle our disagreements by resort to the ballot rather than the bullet. As soon as we abandon this norm, the entire system collapses. If one side believes that the other will not respect the results, and is seeking to predetermine the outcome through violence, then each will feel entitled to resort to arms.