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. 

Your Own Personal Gene

 A friend called me the other week in the midst of a moral quandary. He had encountered an acquaintance of his who was in trouble. But when he tried to offer help, the latter had started asking for more than my friend could offer. I won't go into details, but the whole pattern suggested that my friend was dealing with an emotionally disturbed person—possibly someone suffering from borderline personality disorder. 

After hearing the circumstances described, my own fight-or-flight response kicked in on my friend's behalf. So I offered him all the usual worldly wisdom that people tend to dispense in these situations. I said: "You don't owe him anything; you barely know him." I said: "You have to take care of yourself first. Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting the person seated beside you," etc.

Ergomachia

 The vile wave of xenophobic scapegoating that is afflicting Western politics is the perfect distillation of the politics of despair. When people have abandoned any hope in the realization of egalitarian social progress, all that is left is a frenzied effort to monopolize the few resources that remain. When there is supposedly not enough to go around, each has no choice but to push the others out of the way in order to get his snout into the trough first. The result is the social phenomenon that the political sociologist Robert Michels (borrowing a term from an Italian medical writer) called "ergomachia"—"the struggle for the feeding ground." (Paul trans.) The goal of politics shifts from that of collective progress to scrambling haphazardly to "get one's own" in the struggle for life.  

One can see this dynamic unfolding throughout the developed West; and the center-left parties are scarcely more immune to it than the right. The snap elections in France brought the far-right anti-immigrant National Rally to within spitting distance of a parliamentary majority. The country's other "moderate" political parties have had to shift right on the issue, in order to defuse some of their electoral power and ability to campaign on immigration. In the UK, meanwhile, the Labour Party won a sizable majority and ended 14 years of Tory rule in Parliament. They did so in part by running against the Conservatives' notorious plan to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda. But the new Labour leadership has followed this up with their own pledges in turn to try to "reduce immigration." 

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

 Staring down the Democratic National Convention in August, with its foreordained outcome, many of us are still wondering: how exactly did we get here? Why are we stuck with a candidate who everyone agrees is almost certain to lose the election in November—despite strong public support for a hypothetical Democratic alternative to Trump, so long as it is not Biden? Why is the party almost certain to proceed with nominating someone who is widely perceived as unfit for a second term? Why are we hurling ourselves on the pyre, and simply accepting that we will have to take the loss in the next election—even though everyone agrees that the future of American democracy may be at stake? 

Biden, of course, insists that it is democracy itself that has led to this manifestly undemocratic outcome. The Democratic Party membership had a chance to vote already for their favored candidate. This is what the primary process is all about. And Biden won that vote hands-down. To replace him now at the head of the ticket, he says, would be a flagrant violation of the public will. It would be to betray the party's own democratic commitment to its members. Thus, he maintains, only anti-democratic "elites" and journalists are calling for him to leave the race at this point; the people—by contrast—have spoken. 

Insatiable

 Faced with the spectacle of our two current presidential contenders—both of whom have already had the chance to be president once—I'm forced to wonder sometimes: when will enough be enough? Why is neither man capable of looking himself in the mirror and saying—"you know what? I've accomplished a lot for one life. It's time to pack it in." In short, why is neither man content to rest on his laurels? 

In Trump's case, of course, the explanation is clear enough. He's a pathological narcissist and a megalomaniac to boot. Plus, he faces three more pending criminal prosecutions as soon as he loses the upcoming election. He is therefore like a shark in the water. He has to keep moving to stay alive. This would remain true, even if his personality did not already supply him with the same impetus. 

Back in the Saddle

 When I read Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, All the King's Men, last summer, I knew going in that it might awaken a certain dangerous longing for my previous life. After all, the novel portrays the life of the minor league political strategist and advisor—expert in the arts of skulduggery—and, like all such accounts, it manages to make its Machiavellian protagonist seem a compelling antihero. I feared the novel might make me wish all over again that I had never left my previous job—as a policy strategist for a human rights organization; because where else would I find such a perfect combination of the dark arts of the political operative with the sense of moral purpose and fulfillment that comes from believing one is acting on behalf of a righteous cause? 

Indeed, I have often thought—in the years since—that I was wrong to ever give up that job. I probably would not have done so, had I been able to see the future and know that Trump would be staging a Napoleon-like comeback for a second round. At the time I left the organization, after all, Biden had been president for two years already. Title 42—the anti-asylum policy that was a hangover from the Trump presidency, and which was my bête noire for the three years of its existence—was finally on its way out. It appeared to me that American politics was settling back into an insipid rut of relative normality. To my mind, this meant that I no longer had to devote my energy to being a campaigner. The next chapter of my life didn't have to be about politics—it could be about anything I wanted. 

Not Mad, Just Disappointed

 When I saw an opinion piece a couple weeks ago from a certain New York Times columnist who has made a career for himself as a supposed human rights activist—a piece, specifically, in which he calls on the president to effectively terminate the U.S. asylum program—I was surprised by how little appetite I had to publicly rant about it on Twitter. It wasn't fun in the way it is to denounce the latest horrific statement from J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, say. Rather, this one pained me. 

I could see all the points I'd want to criticize in the column. There was the rank hypocrisy of someone who had made a career calling for refugee rights abroad suddenly reversing course as soon as his own country and his own favored presidential candidate are facing the same dilemma at their borders. There is the fact that Kristof would certainly castigate Turkey, say, for shutting out Syrian refugees—yet, when humanitarian migration is happening at our border, he suddenly sings a different tune. 

Let Not the Land Once Proud of Him...

 I was as disappointed with Biden's debate performance last Thursday as anyone—and I'm just as scared as it is possible to be about the future of his candidacy, and the risk it poses of a potential Trump victory. But I haven't appreciated the role the news media has tried to play—in the wake of these events—as self-appointed kingmaker. Still less have I welcomed the snide and mean-spirited way in which some commentators have done so.

Ever since the debate last week, the New York Times has tried to railroad a certain narrative about what should happen next. On the left-hand side of the homepage, they show one article after another about "panic" inside the Democratic party. Then, on the right, they have the editorial pieces drawing the obvious moral that we are meant to reach from this information: replace Biden at the head of the ticket. 

Teaching to Kill

 Mike Gold's posthumous reputation has not done well. If he is remembered for anything these days, it is for being the epitome of the Stalinist literary hack—someone who submitted his contemporaries not to the bar of artistic judgment, but to the standards of Soviet propaganda. It was Gold who penned all those hysterical Daily Worker columns in which this or that modernist poet was accused of being a "reactionary tool of the capitalists" or a "sentimental bourgeois fantasist," etc. Such at least was the impression that had come down to me. Gold is the target, for instance, of an outstanding satirical poem by E.E. Cummings, "Ballad of an Intellectual," which convincingly and devastatingly accuses him of savaging his contemporaries mostly just to cover up for the fact that he lacked any real talent himself.

But it turns out Gold did write at least one beautiful and human book: his first and only novel—a thinly-veiled autobiography about growing up as the child of Hungarian immigrants in New York's Lower East Side at the dawn of the twentieth century: Jews Without Money. When all of the maniacal fulminations of 1930s propaganda and counter-propaganda have boiled away, leaving not a trace in historical recollection, this book still stands as a moving testament—probably because, for once, Gold wasn't trying to talk about more than he knew. Instead, he was writing about his own life and neighborhood—focusing on his "home town" and "home folks"—as Langston Hughes once advised every aspiring writer to do (by using reverse psychology). The book was therefore a bestseller—and one can still see why, today. 

Diseased Reasoning

 By this point, we've probably all moved on from the Kristi Noem/"Cricket" news cycle—and rightly so. For those who have already forgotten it (as they probably should): this was the controversy about the South Dakota governor and one-time Trump VP contender, after she revealed an episode from her past involving the brutal slaying of a pet dog. What was especially bizarre about this scandal is that it did not emerge from any sleuthing or oppo research. Noem furnished the anecdote herself in a memoir, in which she described how she killed the dog for being difficult to manage. With needless cruelty, she added that she "hated" the animal. Apparently, Noem thought telling this story would make her look good. 

I wrote a blog post about this incident previously, when it was still in the news. In my usual style, I was focused on how I could connect the incident to Byron, theology, and a bunch of other typical hobbyhorses of mine. It took sending the piece to my dad for me to step back from this and remember the actual moral stakes involved. In his response to the post, my dad cut much more closely to the heart of the matter—i.e., what was actually wrong with what Noem did. I thought the way he phrased it was more eloquent and succinct than anything I wrote at the time, so I wanted to share it here. He said: 

Continental Drift

 A sailboat carrying 122 Haitian refugees washed ashore on Key West last week—with at least two of its passengers having to be hospitalized for dehydration, after spending seven days on the open ocean. They are only some of the many people forced to flee their home by a raging humanitarian crisis in Haiti that has upending most aspects of daily life. And many of them may only experience a temporary reprieve in the United States before being deported back to the perils they fled. 

The Biden administration recently announced a welcome expansion of the country's current temporary protected status designation—shielding an estimated 300,000 more people from the threat of forced removal. But the cut-off to qualify for this status was June 3—too early for the people stranded in Key West. Meanwhile, the administration has been running multiple deportation flights to Haiti over the past year—even as the country was too dangerous for its own former prime minister to land his plane. 

There's Always Next Time, Right?

 I've been going back and forth the last two days as to how panicked I think we should be about the Supreme Court's ruling in the Trump immunity case. On the one hand, I'm frankly not surprised by the outcome. It was clear from the oral arguments that the justices were bound to exempt some presidential activities from criminal liability—and, in truth, I'm not sure they were wrong to do so. I see the strength of the argument that an executive official should not face criminal prosecution for actions they undertook within the scope of their role as a legitimate policymaker—the remedies for such actions, if they prove to be misguided, should be political ones, not criminal prosecution. 

The Court therefore had to draw a line somewhere between what constitutes a president's official conduct as the holder of that office, and what constitutes a private criminal action that they undertook while they happened to be president. I'm not sure the Court's conservative majority drew that line in the right place—probably they erred on the side of executive power. But I'm relieved that they drew the line at all. The Court stopped short of declaring the total immunity that Trump asked for; they left the door open to the possibility that a sitting president could be prosecuted for actions they undertook in office, so long as they were acting in a way that could not reasonably be described as part of their official duties. 

Too Late to Be Ambitious?

 In a classic essay on mortality, "Urne-Buriall"—which I also discussed in the previous post—the seventeenth century writer and polymath Sir Thomas Browne at one point makes a striking observation: "'Tis too late to be ambitious," he writes. Why? Because, he argues, the world will imminently be coming to an end. The Biblical prophecies gave the Earth about six thousand years of existence before the apocalypse would descend, he writes. And so, by Browne's reckoning, that puts the likely end of humanity within his own lifetime, or shortly thereafter. 

Browne therefore looks back with something like envy upon the generations that preceded his. They, at least—he reflects—could count on monuments to carry their name for centuries if not millennia to come. The people of Browne's generation, by contrast, could not rely on even this much. In his view, some of the men and women then breathing might live to see the second coming and the resurrection of the flesh—so what was the point of hoping to immortalize our legacies in the memory of generations to come? After all, there would be no such generations to come.