Toward the end of Aaron Powell's discussion of 'post-liberalism' there was introduced the term 'intentional communities'. To me that expressed better the idea I labeled enclaves, where people more or less retreated from the broader society enough to set up their own institutions, like the 60s communes but not so isolated. That came out of my experience moving into a Black neighborhood when I got married and seeing up close how Black families lived in a segregated society. I also learned the LDS missionaries do not always go door knocking but set up housekeeping and allow neighbors to see how well they live and begin to inquire about their habits and values.
It is complicated but intriguing and bizarre people like Integralists muddy the waters.
“How the fuck did liberals convince ourselves that you can beat cancer by doing dumbbell curls? You cannot.” See Figure 3 of Sabel MS, Lee J, Cai S, Englesbe MJ, Holcombe S, Wang S. Sarcopenia as a prognostic factor among patients with stage III melanoma. Annals of Surgical Oncology 18(13): 3579, 2011. It shows dramatic effects of psoas muscle morphometry and survival in stage III melanoma patients. This research group at the University of Michigan has shown similar effects of psoas measures on other cancers as well. The psoas is a "core" muscle that would have benefitted from Justice Ginsberg's core exertice routine. Since you are such an oncologic genius and so dissmissively certain there is no association between musculoskeletal morphometry and cancer survival, please explain Figure 3 of that paper.
Don't lose sight of the real connections between conservative, Inc. and the truckers. Are conservatives doing anything to help the day-to-day lives of truckers? Of course not. They have continuously supported policies that favored trucking related companies at the expense of individual truckers. But Nixon was no better and yet he obtained the endorsement of the Teamsters. How? Well do not kid yourself that the "southern strategy" did not play a central part. Truckers are overwhelmingly red-neck white and almost universally male (never forget about the male part in today's conservative, Inc.).
I'd only add that I think talking about it as a quest for power misses a very specific nuance. There are people who want power because there are things they want to do, for good or ill. I think these people want power for the purpose of intimidation, to remind people who's boss.
JVL: This thought from your first item: Christian theocracy. Can you please write more about this? America is starting to resemble Gilead from Margaret Atwood....
“Nothing. Without power, there is nothing,” James Carville.
Republicans have taken that truth to heart.
The only guiding principle in Conservatism, Inc. is "Owning the Libs". It is also the unifying principle bringing together several constituencies to confront their common enemy. The only difference among them is the degree to which they wish to own the libs and how that ownership is manifested.
There is a through line of moral corruption and intellectual incoherence from Newt Gingrich, to Sarah Palin, to the TEAParty, to Trump, to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boebert and Madison Cawthorn.
American conservatism needs to return to Burke and Disraeli and put away the Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
It’s funny, I find the same rank hypocrisy on the Left. Since I can remember, I’ve been lectured that the Left cares for Human Rights, Equality, People of Color, etc. However, they quickly and effortlessly, abandoned millions of Afghans to a patriarchal terrorist group that truly implements systemic racism, persecutes LGBTQ, and is leading our former allies into a mass starvation.
And the most that large segments of the Left can muster is: forever war, imperialism, etc.
Perhaps this hypocrisy is inherent in both parties?
That ignores the fact that there were many on the left who did not want us to pull out. It also ignores the fact that many on the left, as Christopher Hitchens explained long ago, are leftists not so much because they are anti-authoritarian but because they are anti-colonial, and pulling out of Afghanistan was perfectly consistent with that professed (and real) motive.
So some leftists opposed the withdrawal because of human rights issues, while others accepted it at least in part because our presence smacked of colonialism, which they are consistent in opposing. You haven't identified any hypocrisy. It sounds like you are wielding the H word as many conservatives do, unhappy that most leftists don't agree with your position and refusing to accept that they may have their reasons for that even if you don't like or agree with those reasons.
Hypocrisy is pretending to be something that one isn't. Being a leftist and supporting our withdrawal from Afghanistan does not require any pretense, as I have shown. So you are yet to identify hypocrisy. You have only identified a leftist position that you don't like.
What would have satisfied you? Staying in Afghanistan? Leaving? Leaving, but also leaving huge taxpayer $ behind? The problem wasn't in the leaving. It was in the going with no serious idea of what would be required, or alternatively, no desire to confront what would actually be required, because the political will for that never existed.
What would've satisfied me? Perhaps not abandoning 30,000 SIVs to the Taliban. Perhaps securing the ten of thousands of Afghan soldiers who killed, fought, and bled next to me for nearly ten years fighting Al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and the Taliban. You want to leave? That's fine. I disagree and think we found an imperfect way of staying and providing a modicum of stability. But abandoning people -- our allies who did more for this country than 99.9% of the American population -- to a group that is hunting them, well that's the hypocrisy I find obnoxious. So while the modern day GOP is repulsive to me, Biden's repulsive instinct should also be called out by the very part that professes to be for BIPOC, LGBTQ++, etc.
I largely agree with the abandonment bit. It's an effing tragedy, an epic moral failure. You do have to consider however, that it was the Rightist Trump admin that set this abandonment into motion at Doha, yet never took step *one to get the SIV machine oiled up and running at even *close to capacity, because (guess what?) tons of non-white (and by golly, Muslim on top of that) immigrants on Fox News isn't going to play well for "the base" in front of a reelection campaign. I find that obnoxious hypocrisy smack on the Right, while acknowledging that it can be found on both sides.
Another point on the abandonment of our friends in Afghanistan; Stephen Miller holds a lot of the blame for that, as during the Trump years he deliberately made SIVs very, very cumbersome and difficult. He had a freakish loathing for immigrants from anywhere but Norway.
Yeah. If it's true that the Taliban was prepared for the offensive if we didn't leave, the political will was not there in either party to commit troops back into Afghanistan to hold the line.
We absolutely had a moral and humane duty to do better. We failed in part because our system is broken and frankly not capable of honoring commitments to allies that have politically inconvenient troubles. We need to keep that in mind going ahead, as does anyone who may end up relying on us. We will be there until a bit after it stops polling well, and then all bets are off.
I find references to "commitment to allies" misplaced when talking about Afghanistan. That country (or more accurately, regime) was not an "ally" of the U.S., it was a country that let us operate in it in return for what they got out of it (money and maintenance of their power). Suggestions that our commitments to the defense of Canada or Poland or the like is comparable to our relationship with the Afghan regime--where we operated INSIDE the country for nineteen years and finally said "Basta!"--are nonsense, and they are unfortunate since they undermine confidence in our treaty obligations and that, in turn, can embolden potential attackers such as Russia.
My point is that our commitments are ultimately only so strong as the president in office cares to make them.
We demonstrated in 2020 that we were completely incapable of punishing a president for blatant extortion of an ally with Trump's first impeachment. We also witnessed Trump's sick and pathetic attempts to cozy up with Kim Jong-un. I'm pretty sure the RoK satisfies your definition of an ally, and were we to get Trump Round 2 here soon, they have very little reason to have any confidence in our support.
Ultimately unless and until we develop better mechanisms for holding the executive branch accountable, our ability to count on sustaining foreign policy commitments is very low.
There is hypocrisy on both sides, and, worldwide, authoritarianism on both sides, too.
As of 2005, for example, worldwide, people's free-market and authoritarian leanings were opposed. Conservatism (in the sense of reducing difference over time) and authoritarianism (policing difference in "us" now) have some natural overlap, but not necessarily — for example, not if what you're conserving is a tradition of pluralism.
American politics is unusual, for having bundled free-market, conservative, and authoritarian leanings into one coalition. Perhaps that was the real fusionism, and not necessarily one that the free-market and more pluralistic crowd on the right knew they were signing up for (even smart, well-intentioned people won't know everything).
There is *a lot* of hypocrisy in pretending to be anti-authoritarian while being authoritarian. There's no inherent reason for this hypocrisy to be limited to the right. There are historic reasons in America (like the movement of segregationists from D to R) for it to appear flagrantly on the right, though it may be present — and growing — on the left as well.
JVL, I can't catch all your newsletters, and may have missed a few newsletters of newsletters. I was already following The UnPopulist (clearly, you've got good taste). One with a similar name is Unpopular Front, by John Gantz. He seems to have a bead on a lot of the right's grift:
Loved this newsletter! I was so pissed when RGB didn’t retire and became a meme. Also, I’m a huge fan of the stoics. Seneca is another ancient badass of self control. If anyone wants a great read, I can’t recommend “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton enough. It’s one of my favorite books.
Okay, I have to defend RBG. If she HAD retired earlier during the Obama administration, why does anyone think Mitch McConnell would have done anything different than what he did when she died? I think she was hanging on because she knew good and well McConnell would find a way to scuttle any Obama replacement in his second term. I suppose a case could be made that she could have retired during Obama’s first term.
Definitely, as did almost everyone. RBG doesn’t deserve the wrath directed at her for delaying her resignation, IMO. How I wish it had turned out differently.
For several decades I patiently listened to libertarian arguments against civil rights laws on the grounds of "freedom of association." In certain cases, such as religious schools and small businesses, I was largely persuaded. But now, that's gone out the window, and only a tiny remnant of libertarians still have a consistent belief in freedom of association. I guess it is not so easy when the shoe is on the other foot. And I understand that many libertarian elites still hold to their values; but that is not where the "libertarian" masses are.
"There is no conservative philosophical attachment to freedom or liberty any more than there is an integralist or populist love of the common good.
There is only power."
So well said. Thank you.
I want to draw attention to a really alarming discussion I listened to yesterday. After listening to JVL and Sarah on the Secret Show discussing the Ottawa Trucker situation, which Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are all cheering, along with their mouthpieces on Fox, I tuned into another Never Trump, former Republican podcast I like, "Politicology."
Now, I don't want to be the kind of person who spreads conspiracy theories on the Internet, but Mike Madrid, long-time Republican operative, has an interpretation that really made me sit up straight. "I don't believe this is a social movement at all. I believe this is a paid operation.... There is something far more nefarious behind this than just a handful of people misbehaving. There is a very serious conflict that is taking place in Ottawa right now that is heavily funded, extremely sophisticated, and I would suggest it is probably heavily armed...There's an operation happening here that could be potentially extremely explosive, and I don't believe it's just a handful of cranks and militia members... These movements are happening in different parts of Europe...because this stuff is orchestrated in a very sophisticated transnational political operation being run by countries that have a vested interest in the destabilization of these countries."
Here's a link, starting with his comments, but the earlier conversation is worth a listen, too.
Coupla' comments: 1. It could be both social movement and paid operation, like the Tea Party of the early Obama years. 2. As I read "a sophisticated transnational political operation" I was nearly expecting you to say "run by Jews." 3. JVL's quote was about how the integralist / common-good conservatives view the world, not how JVL views the world.
After I posted the above, I was reading The Guardian’s Long Reads. Their feature from the archive is a really stunning story from 2015 about the secret meeting between Thatcher and Murdoch in the early 80s, which smoothed the way for his purchase of TheTimes, apparently in exchange for political support for the Thatcher government. When the story of this time is told, Rupert Murdoch will be one of the most important people in the long attack on democracy around the English-speaking world.
I read something similar today in The Atlantic, making the case that the caution the Canadian government is exercising in dealing with this group is important and necessary to avoid something catastrophic. Scary times.
There is high libertarianism and low libertarianism. High libertarians live in a fantasy world in which the social space left unoccupied by strong government remains a vacuum which gangsters and thugs voluntarily refrain from filling --because, Liberty. Low libertarians know better but imagine themselves as filling that vacuum so as to prevent worse people from doing so. .
Libertarianism and conservatism are not really compatible.
"There is no philosophical attachment to freedom or liberty...or...love of the common good."
This is absolutely the single best distillation down to the very essence of "what's wrong with the Right" that I've seen anywhere, anytime. An Ah Ha Moment for me only in its succinctness, since my brain, which doesn't like complicated things, has been searching for such a simple, straightforward and understandable explanation for some time now for what the fuck has happened to such a large portion of this country that I have so loved for so long. It's been whispering similar stuff into the ear of my consciousness, but without such clarity or brevity.
I think of Charlie's book How the Right Lost Its Mind, and I realize that isn't what happened at all. That is only a symptom of what happened. What happened is the Right lost its soul. It's forsaken the American Spirit, the stalwart abhorrence and resistance of tyranny and the love and embrace of freedom and liberty born in Lexington and Concord all those years ago and manifested again and again in places like Normandy and Iwo Jima, Bastogne and Okinawa.
It relinquished any love for the common good and has fallen in love with only itself. Its vociferous pretense to patriotism is a sham, a deceit of the first order, deserving of condemnation and now requiring the resistance of those clear-eyed Americans who have not relinquished their love of those things in favor of feel-good self-serving self-delusion.
I am angry about this. And disheartened. And some days I don't know what to do about it other than let that anger spill out here and in similar places. Forgive me for that. But at least I know when I'm here, I'm among friends, fellow Americans whose beliefs in the values I spoke of above are much the same as my own. Otherwise, what reason is there for you to be here? And I am grateful for that.
How did the right lose their mind : they lost power and influence. How did Putin lose his mind : Russia lost power and influence. People don’t just walk away from power.
When I was a kid in the 80s and Reagan was incredibly popular, Democrats still controlled Congress. There were still some rural folks here in the South that voted Democrat. They are literally nonexistent now. But Democrats then weren’t the Democrats of today. They were mostly older, white traditionalists.
Fast forward to today and those people are quickly getting outnumbered. Because of the Senate, the electoral college and is not having expanded the number of seats in Congress for the last 100 years the rural voters of America punch WAY above their weight class. 50 Dem senators represent 42 million more people than the other 50!
Even with that imbalance they’re losing the narrative of the country because of modernity. Things inevitably change, but I know a lot of people who are resistant to even minor change. They’re not going to just walk away from that power, especially since they see how effective violence and propaganda can be.
Thanks for the tip. Hope I can find the time to check that out. I know folks like this have been around an awfully long time, and there are surely some cut from the same bolt of wholesale cloth at the other end of the political divide. They just don't have the upper hand in the attention market, and are a less homogenous group I believe, which thwarts - at least for now - their ability to coalesce into an effective power structure.
I suppose part of what I was trying to say is that although I'm aware that a lot of folks, myself among them, have been to some extent hoodwinked as to what conservatism was or had the potential to become, at least when the Bushes or Regan or Ford or even Nixon held power, I didn't go to bed at night wondering if I would awaken the next day to discover that the country that I love was no longer the country that I love because the "conservative values" they, and the party they led, held at the time had authored its destruction. And I doubt if many rank-and-file Republicans of those days would have taken kindly to any of these men or their contemporary party luminaries singing the praises of the likes of any of the Victor Orbans around at that time.
When I said what I did about the Right, I said it meaning that at least for most of my lifetime, that distinct entity in the body politic, despite any of its sundry shortcomings on other issues, had at least seemed to believe in what I called the American Spirit and the terms I used to define that. That they have now cast even that into the sewer in the pursuit of power is the rankest of betrayals. And if they become successful in this enterprise, the only comfort I will take is that for many of my countrymen with whom I used to feel a common bond based on that spirit, I have no doubt that they will awaken one day to discover that, to paraphrase a line JFK once spoke, the fruits of their victory will be ashes in their mouths.
I'm not disparaging the article you linked to, which is more than the passage you quoted, but isn't Adorno's psychologizing a bit out of date?
Subsequent scholars like Karen Stenner have taken Hofstadter's insights and ditched some of its 20th-century psychological baggage. I highly recommend her "The Authoritarian Dynamic". These scholars focus more on measuring traits that can be measured, rather than speculating on the unconscious (which, how would you measure it?). For example,
"Authoritarian submission, authoritarian conventionalism, and rejection of egalitarianism significantly predicted support for Trump when comparisons included Democrats, but they did not distinguish Trump support from that for other Republican candidates. Instead, individuals who backed Donald Trump during the Republican primaries and the general election in 2016 were significantly more likely to exhibit group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression than backers of other Republican candidates. That is, compared to other Republicans, they were especially likely to believe that: 'Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups'; 'What our country needs instead of more "civil rights" is a good stiff dose of law and order'; 'Some groups of people must be kept in their place'; and 'What our country really needs is a strong, determined President which will crush the evil and set us in our right way again.'"
Right, I'm not disparaging Adorno or his experience. He had good insights using the tools of his time. The Freudian elements present in the tools of his time are mercifully dying out, though.
Toward the end of Aaron Powell's discussion of 'post-liberalism' there was introduced the term 'intentional communities'. To me that expressed better the idea I labeled enclaves, where people more or less retreated from the broader society enough to set up their own institutions, like the 60s communes but not so isolated. That came out of my experience moving into a Black neighborhood when I got married and seeing up close how Black families lived in a segregated society. I also learned the LDS missionaries do not always go door knocking but set up housekeeping and allow neighbors to see how well they live and begin to inquire about their habits and values.
It is complicated but intriguing and bizarre people like Integralists muddy the waters.
“How the fuck did liberals convince ourselves that you can beat cancer by doing dumbbell curls? You cannot.” See Figure 3 of Sabel MS, Lee J, Cai S, Englesbe MJ, Holcombe S, Wang S. Sarcopenia as a prognostic factor among patients with stage III melanoma. Annals of Surgical Oncology 18(13): 3579, 2011. It shows dramatic effects of psoas muscle morphometry and survival in stage III melanoma patients. This research group at the University of Michigan has shown similar effects of psoas measures on other cancers as well. The psoas is a "core" muscle that would have benefitted from Justice Ginsberg's core exertice routine. Since you are such an oncologic genius and so dissmissively certain there is no association between musculoskeletal morphometry and cancer survival, please explain Figure 3 of that paper.
Wow… all I can say is that YOU are freaking AWESOME.
Don't lose sight of the real connections between conservative, Inc. and the truckers. Are conservatives doing anything to help the day-to-day lives of truckers? Of course not. They have continuously supported policies that favored trucking related companies at the expense of individual truckers. But Nixon was no better and yet he obtained the endorsement of the Teamsters. How? Well do not kid yourself that the "southern strategy" did not play a central part. Truckers are overwhelmingly red-neck white and almost universally male (never forget about the male part in today's conservative, Inc.).
I'd only add that I think talking about it as a quest for power misses a very specific nuance. There are people who want power because there are things they want to do, for good or ill. I think these people want power for the purpose of intimidation, to remind people who's boss.
JVL: This thought from your first item: Christian theocracy. Can you please write more about this? America is starting to resemble Gilead from Margaret Atwood....
“Nothing. Without power, there is nothing,” James Carville.
Republicans have taken that truth to heart.
The only guiding principle in Conservatism, Inc. is "Owning the Libs". It is also the unifying principle bringing together several constituencies to confront their common enemy. The only difference among them is the degree to which they wish to own the libs and how that ownership is manifested.
There is a through line of moral corruption and intellectual incoherence from Newt Gingrich, to Sarah Palin, to the TEAParty, to Trump, to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boebert and Madison Cawthorn.
American conservatism needs to return to Burke and Disraeli and put away the Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
It’s funny, I find the same rank hypocrisy on the Left. Since I can remember, I’ve been lectured that the Left cares for Human Rights, Equality, People of Color, etc. However, they quickly and effortlessly, abandoned millions of Afghans to a patriarchal terrorist group that truly implements systemic racism, persecutes LGBTQ, and is leading our former allies into a mass starvation.
And the most that large segments of the Left can muster is: forever war, imperialism, etc.
Perhaps this hypocrisy is inherent in both parties?
That ignores the fact that there were many on the left who did not want us to pull out. It also ignores the fact that many on the left, as Christopher Hitchens explained long ago, are leftists not so much because they are anti-authoritarian but because they are anti-colonial, and pulling out of Afghanistan was perfectly consistent with that professed (and real) motive.
Sure. Some did. Just like there are conservatives -- George Will, Mitt Romney, etc -- who do believe in Freedom.
So some leftists opposed the withdrawal because of human rights issues, while others accepted it at least in part because our presence smacked of colonialism, which they are consistent in opposing. You haven't identified any hypocrisy. It sounds like you are wielding the H word as many conservatives do, unhappy that most leftists don't agree with your position and refusing to accept that they may have their reasons for that even if you don't like or agree with those reasons.
I have identified the hypocrisy. If you can't see it, then we can just agree to disagree.
Hypocrisy is pretending to be something that one isn't. Being a leftist and supporting our withdrawal from Afghanistan does not require any pretense, as I have shown. So you are yet to identify hypocrisy. You have only identified a leftist position that you don't like.
Whatever you say.
What would have satisfied you? Staying in Afghanistan? Leaving? Leaving, but also leaving huge taxpayer $ behind? The problem wasn't in the leaving. It was in the going with no serious idea of what would be required, or alternatively, no desire to confront what would actually be required, because the political will for that never existed.
What would've satisfied me? Perhaps not abandoning 30,000 SIVs to the Taliban. Perhaps securing the ten of thousands of Afghan soldiers who killed, fought, and bled next to me for nearly ten years fighting Al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and the Taliban. You want to leave? That's fine. I disagree and think we found an imperfect way of staying and providing a modicum of stability. But abandoning people -- our allies who did more for this country than 99.9% of the American population -- to a group that is hunting them, well that's the hypocrisy I find obnoxious. So while the modern day GOP is repulsive to me, Biden's repulsive instinct should also be called out by the very part that professes to be for BIPOC, LGBTQ++, etc.
I largely agree with the abandonment bit. It's an effing tragedy, an epic moral failure. You do have to consider however, that it was the Rightist Trump admin that set this abandonment into motion at Doha, yet never took step *one to get the SIV machine oiled up and running at even *close to capacity, because (guess what?) tons of non-white (and by golly, Muslim on top of that) immigrants on Fox News isn't going to play well for "the base" in front of a reelection campaign. I find that obnoxious hypocrisy smack on the Right, while acknowledging that it can be found on both sides.
Another point on the abandonment of our friends in Afghanistan; Stephen Miller holds a lot of the blame for that, as during the Trump years he deliberately made SIVs very, very cumbersome and difficult. He had a freakish loathing for immigrants from anywhere but Norway.
Yes, Miller was the human spanner who tossed himself into the SIV works.
Yeah. If it's true that the Taliban was prepared for the offensive if we didn't leave, the political will was not there in either party to commit troops back into Afghanistan to hold the line.
We absolutely had a moral and humane duty to do better. We failed in part because our system is broken and frankly not capable of honoring commitments to allies that have politically inconvenient troubles. We need to keep that in mind going ahead, as does anyone who may end up relying on us. We will be there until a bit after it stops polling well, and then all bets are off.
I find references to "commitment to allies" misplaced when talking about Afghanistan. That country (or more accurately, regime) was not an "ally" of the U.S., it was a country that let us operate in it in return for what they got out of it (money and maintenance of their power). Suggestions that our commitments to the defense of Canada or Poland or the like is comparable to our relationship with the Afghan regime--where we operated INSIDE the country for nineteen years and finally said "Basta!"--are nonsense, and they are unfortunate since they undermine confidence in our treaty obligations and that, in turn, can embolden potential attackers such as Russia.
My point is that our commitments are ultimately only so strong as the president in office cares to make them.
We demonstrated in 2020 that we were completely incapable of punishing a president for blatant extortion of an ally with Trump's first impeachment. We also witnessed Trump's sick and pathetic attempts to cozy up with Kim Jong-un. I'm pretty sure the RoK satisfies your definition of an ally, and were we to get Trump Round 2 here soon, they have very little reason to have any confidence in our support.
Ultimately unless and until we develop better mechanisms for holding the executive branch accountable, our ability to count on sustaining foreign policy commitments is very low.
There is hypocrisy on both sides, and, worldwide, authoritarianism on both sides, too.
As of 2005, for example, worldwide, people's free-market and authoritarian leanings were opposed. Conservatism (in the sense of reducing difference over time) and authoritarianism (policing difference in "us" now) have some natural overlap, but not necessarily — for example, not if what you're conserving is a tradition of pluralism.
American politics is unusual, for having bundled free-market, conservative, and authoritarian leanings into one coalition. Perhaps that was the real fusionism, and not necessarily one that the free-market and more pluralistic crowd on the right knew they were signing up for (even smart, well-intentioned people won't know everything).
There is *a lot* of hypocrisy in pretending to be anti-authoritarian while being authoritarian. There's no inherent reason for this hypocrisy to be limited to the right. There are historic reasons in America (like the movement of segregationists from D to R) for it to appear flagrantly on the right, though it may be present — and growing — on the left as well.
https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Dynamic-Cambridge-Political-Psychology/dp/052153478X
Year of the Tiger. Burrow down deep for the win.
JVL, I can't catch all your newsletters, and may have missed a few newsletters of newsletters. I was already following The UnPopulist (clearly, you've got good taste). One with a similar name is Unpopular Front, by John Gantz. He seems to have a bead on a lot of the right's grift:
https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-week-in-fascism
https://johnganz.substack.com/p/were-all-postmodern-neo-marxists
https://johnganz.substack.com/p/what-is-trumpism
You might have mentioned Unpopular Front already, but if you haven't, I thought I'd put a good word in.
I think you may have found him through me ; )
Loved this newsletter! I was so pissed when RGB didn’t retire and became a meme. Also, I’m a huge fan of the stoics. Seneca is another ancient badass of self control. If anyone wants a great read, I can’t recommend “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton enough. It’s one of my favorite books.
Okay, I have to defend RBG. If she HAD retired earlier during the Obama administration, why does anyone think Mitch McConnell would have done anything different than what he did when she died? I think she was hanging on because she knew good and well McConnell would find a way to scuttle any Obama replacement in his second term. I suppose a case could be made that she could have retired during Obama’s first term.
she thought Hillary would win.
Definitely, as did almost everyone. RBG doesn’t deserve the wrath directed at her for delaying her resignation, IMO. How I wish it had turned out differently.
For several decades I patiently listened to libertarian arguments against civil rights laws on the grounds of "freedom of association." In certain cases, such as religious schools and small businesses, I was largely persuaded. But now, that's gone out the window, and only a tiny remnant of libertarians still have a consistent belief in freedom of association. I guess it is not so easy when the shoe is on the other foot. And I understand that many libertarian elites still hold to their values; but that is not where the "libertarian" masses are.
"There is no conservative philosophical attachment to freedom or liberty any more than there is an integralist or populist love of the common good.
There is only power."
So well said. Thank you.
I want to draw attention to a really alarming discussion I listened to yesterday. After listening to JVL and Sarah on the Secret Show discussing the Ottawa Trucker situation, which Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are all cheering, along with their mouthpieces on Fox, I tuned into another Never Trump, former Republican podcast I like, "Politicology."
Now, I don't want to be the kind of person who spreads conspiracy theories on the Internet, but Mike Madrid, long-time Republican operative, has an interpretation that really made me sit up straight. "I don't believe this is a social movement at all. I believe this is a paid operation.... There is something far more nefarious behind this than just a handful of people misbehaving. There is a very serious conflict that is taking place in Ottawa right now that is heavily funded, extremely sophisticated, and I would suggest it is probably heavily armed...There's an operation happening here that could be potentially extremely explosive, and I don't believe it's just a handful of cranks and militia members... These movements are happening in different parts of Europe...because this stuff is orchestrated in a very sophisticated transnational political operation being run by countries that have a vested interest in the destabilization of these countries."
Here's a link, starting with his comments, but the earlier conversation is worth a listen, too.
https://overcast.fm/+kdRKiqmtA/34:04
I really hope there's nothing to this, but, to requote JVL, "There is only power."
Coupla' comments: 1. It could be both social movement and paid operation, like the Tea Party of the early Obama years. 2. As I read "a sophisticated transnational political operation" I was nearly expecting you to say "run by Jews." 3. JVL's quote was about how the integralist / common-good conservatives view the world, not how JVL views the world.
Your reaction to #2–the problem is my excerpting. He is talking about authoritarian governments, specifically Putin.
Got it.
After I posted the above, I was reading The Guardian’s Long Reads. Their feature from the archive is a really stunning story from 2015 about the secret meeting between Thatcher and Murdoch in the early 80s, which smoothed the way for his purchase of TheTimes, apparently in exchange for political support for the Thatcher government. When the story of this time is told, Rupert Murdoch will be one of the most important people in the long attack on democracy around the English-speaking world.
I read something similar today in The Atlantic, making the case that the caution the Canadian government is exercising in dealing with this group is important and necessary to avoid something catastrophic. Scary times.
Cool
There is high libertarianism and low libertarianism. High libertarians live in a fantasy world in which the social space left unoccupied by strong government remains a vacuum which gangsters and thugs voluntarily refrain from filling --because, Liberty. Low libertarians know better but imagine themselves as filling that vacuum so as to prevent worse people from doing so. .
Libertarianism and conservatism are not really compatible.
"There is no philosophical attachment to freedom or liberty...or...love of the common good."
This is absolutely the single best distillation down to the very essence of "what's wrong with the Right" that I've seen anywhere, anytime. An Ah Ha Moment for me only in its succinctness, since my brain, which doesn't like complicated things, has been searching for such a simple, straightforward and understandable explanation for some time now for what the fuck has happened to such a large portion of this country that I have so loved for so long. It's been whispering similar stuff into the ear of my consciousness, but without such clarity or brevity.
I think of Charlie's book How the Right Lost Its Mind, and I realize that isn't what happened at all. That is only a symptom of what happened. What happened is the Right lost its soul. It's forsaken the American Spirit, the stalwart abhorrence and resistance of tyranny and the love and embrace of freedom and liberty born in Lexington and Concord all those years ago and manifested again and again in places like Normandy and Iwo Jima, Bastogne and Okinawa.
It relinquished any love for the common good and has fallen in love with only itself. Its vociferous pretense to patriotism is a sham, a deceit of the first order, deserving of condemnation and now requiring the resistance of those clear-eyed Americans who have not relinquished their love of those things in favor of feel-good self-serving self-delusion.
I am angry about this. And disheartened. And some days I don't know what to do about it other than let that anger spill out here and in similar places. Forgive me for that. But at least I know when I'm here, I'm among friends, fellow Americans whose beliefs in the values I spoke of above are much the same as my own. Otherwise, what reason is there for you to be here? And I am grateful for that.
How did the right lose their mind : they lost power and influence. How did Putin lose his mind : Russia lost power and influence. People don’t just walk away from power.
When I was a kid in the 80s and Reagan was incredibly popular, Democrats still controlled Congress. There were still some rural folks here in the South that voted Democrat. They are literally nonexistent now. But Democrats then weren’t the Democrats of today. They were mostly older, white traditionalists.
Fast forward to today and those people are quickly getting outnumbered. Because of the Senate, the electoral college and is not having expanded the number of seats in Congress for the last 100 years the rural voters of America punch WAY above their weight class. 50 Dem senators represent 42 million more people than the other 50!
Even with that imbalance they’re losing the narrative of the country because of modernity. Things inevitably change, but I know a lot of people who are resistant to even minor change. They’re not going to just walk away from that power, especially since they see how effective violence and propaganda can be.
Well we do know that the “conservative” brain is wired differently than the liberal brain.
Thanks for the tip. Hope I can find the time to check that out. I know folks like this have been around an awfully long time, and there are surely some cut from the same bolt of wholesale cloth at the other end of the political divide. They just don't have the upper hand in the attention market, and are a less homogenous group I believe, which thwarts - at least for now - their ability to coalesce into an effective power structure.
I suppose part of what I was trying to say is that although I'm aware that a lot of folks, myself among them, have been to some extent hoodwinked as to what conservatism was or had the potential to become, at least when the Bushes or Regan or Ford or even Nixon held power, I didn't go to bed at night wondering if I would awaken the next day to discover that the country that I love was no longer the country that I love because the "conservative values" they, and the party they led, held at the time had authored its destruction. And I doubt if many rank-and-file Republicans of those days would have taken kindly to any of these men or their contemporary party luminaries singing the praises of the likes of any of the Victor Orbans around at that time.
When I said what I did about the Right, I said it meaning that at least for most of my lifetime, that distinct entity in the body politic, despite any of its sundry shortcomings on other issues, had at least seemed to believe in what I called the American Spirit and the terms I used to define that. That they have now cast even that into the sewer in the pursuit of power is the rankest of betrayals. And if they become successful in this enterprise, the only comfort I will take is that for many of my countrymen with whom I used to feel a common bond based on that spirit, I have no doubt that they will awaken one day to discover that, to paraphrase a line JFK once spoke, the fruits of their victory will be ashes in their mouths.
Always good to be on the same page about existing, eh?
100%!
I'm not disparaging the article you linked to, which is more than the passage you quoted, but isn't Adorno's psychologizing a bit out of date?
Subsequent scholars like Karen Stenner have taken Hofstadter's insights and ditched some of its 20th-century psychological baggage. I highly recommend her "The Authoritarian Dynamic". These scholars focus more on measuring traits that can be measured, rather than speculating on the unconscious (which, how would you measure it?). For example,
"Authoritarian submission, authoritarian conventionalism, and rejection of egalitarianism significantly predicted support for Trump when comparisons included Democrats, but they did not distinguish Trump support from that for other Republican candidates. Instead, individuals who backed Donald Trump during the Republican primaries and the general election in 2016 were significantly more likely to exhibit group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression than backers of other Republican candidates. That is, compared to other Republicans, they were especially likely to believe that: 'Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups'; 'What our country needs instead of more "civil rights" is a good stiff dose of law and order'; 'Some groups of people must be kept in their place'; and 'What our country really needs is a strong, determined President which will crush the evil and set us in our right way again.'"
https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/psychology/documents/facultypublications/johnjost/Group-Based%20Dominance%20&%20Authoritarian%20Aggression%20Predict%20Support%20for%20Trump.pdf
Right, I'm not disparaging Adorno or his experience. He had good insights using the tools of his time. The Freudian elements present in the tools of his time are mercifully dying out, though.