Archives: briefs

For the better part of a year now, one of my regular listens has been a podcast concerned with the U.S. legal scene, Law & Chaos. I don’t have background of any depth in the subject — would not, chances are, be drawn to the material were it not for events of great consequence unfolding at rapid pace for Americans in this arena now.

I do have depth of experience, I guess it’s fair to say, in American religion — not a subject unrelated to that of law, by any means! One’s grasp of either might be improved by attention to the other. (One’s grasping is one thing and one’s comporting oneself responsibly in respect to things grasped quite another, should that need saying.)

In both their episodes in the past week, the Law & Chaos hosts devote a little space to commentary on U.S. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch’s recent book-touring. Their attitude is scorn — and justly so. They miss the mark somewhat, though, in my judgment, in accounting for his fault. That is, they object to Fox News-guest Gorsuch from a stance that I think overstates the U.S. founding documents’ rejection of religion and religious principle in the republic’s formation.

Links to the week’s Law & Chaos episodes are below. (The longer Gorsuch diatribe is at minute 9 in the first, Tuesday’s.)

What I really want to showcase in this post, though, is an episode of another show I’m getting a good deal out of these days, Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub’s In Bed with the Right — an episode that happens to converge this week with Law & Chaos’s on interest in Jefferson’s language in the Declaration’s opening lines, but which situates it helpfully in a greater (not to say comprehensive) story of statement and counter-statement across centuries and cultures, and which captures something of the ambivalence and unresolvedness — in fact, confusion — to be heard in the American founding voice.

An excerpt from Daub and Donegan’s conversation (with no mention of Gorsuch; he does make brief appearance a few minutes further on, though):

AD:If we think about something like Jefferson’s ‘endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable [sic] rights,’ I don’t think that’s from Hobbes, that’s from Locke.

MD:Yes.

AD:And Locke sort of takes Hobbes and reinvests the ‘natural’ with content, right? With something non-instrumental. Hobbes says that it’s in our nature to seek commonwealth only because our nature is shit — our whole thing is dogshit, and we have to sort of flock together and, like, stop killing each other ’cause, otherwise, life is short. And Locke is sort of starting to say, well, no, there are things that are true of human beings that you can base a political order on that we can deduce, that have content.

That’s I think what people mean when they say that the ‘creator’ in the phrase ‘endowed by their Creator‘ is actually load-bearing — like, which is something that I think those of us who are kind of more secular kind of tend to scoff at —

MD:Yeah —

AD:— that’s what I’m guessing they have to hang their hat on. They have to say, ‘Look, it is not a Hobbesian document, he’s not saying the only way to survive in the Americas is to all band together so fuckin’ let’s do it, he’s saying We are endowed by our Creator,’ which says there is a human nature beyond our animality that we are basing our covenant on.

MD:Yeah, it’s a higher aspiration than mere survival, it’s a —

AD:Yeah. But also drawing on a higher resource, if that makes sense, right?

MD:Yes. A higher authority, right? He’s justifying his at the time seemingly kind of suicidal defiance of monarchical authority with this recourse to something that is greater than and preceding the, the king, right?

AD:Yeah. Yeah.

MD:It aspires to compliance with a higher law, and it aspires to a better kind of life. That’s why it’s a beautiful document to read!

AD:Yeah. Yeah. And, at the same time, I do think — and, again, I’m ambling into, like, decades of debate here — it’s clear that Locke doesn’t base that content religiously. So, like, it’s also — we’re kind of right back where we started — it’s also possible to sort of anchor these rights in, you know, just the observation of humans, for instance, or in our capacity for reason, etcetera etcetera, right? So like it’s, it’s not clear that this has to be religious, right? There is this kind of Schmittian kind of secularization thesis, sometimes, in these, where it’s like, ‘Oh it’s all theology that’s just getting secularized.’ Like well, no, not necessarily.

MD:Right.

AD:Right, like — there’s new content being found here, and I think Locke is explicit in that that’s his project. And so the language of natural ‘law’ or natural ‘rights’ is everywhere around the American revolution, around all the revolutions, right? Thomas Paine writes about it. If you even think about, like, what’s supposedly discoverable by common sense, it is that kind of stuff, right?

And so this is something that has always had a kind of purchase on American public discourse; at the same time, it’s very noticeable that, like, none of them seem to draw on supposedly ‘natural’ things, as in, like, the kind of things that we would get after a Darwinian turn, where we get to like, ‘Well, as animals we have to be like this,’ or you know like, ‘Evolution teaches us that — blah blah blah blah blah.’ Right, like, even, ironically, people who hate Darwin sort of become Darwinians in arguing for natural law. That’s how we get sort of evo-psych stuff, where it’s like, ‘Well you see, it’s just a natural law that I enjoy,’ you know, ‘narrower hips and wider bosoms.’

MD:‘Women evolved to pick up after me, actually.’ Yeah —

AD:Yeah. Right, that sort of stuff, it’s a perversion, really, of that impulse. But importantly, it draws on the fact that the United States, really, in its founding has this very strong connection to natural law. In that essay that I mentioned in the beginning by Christine Pierce, she points out that, like, there’s the obvious question, when we talk about natural law reasoning: What do we mean by Nature? And, I’m hopefully not distorting her argument here, I think she says, like, there’s an even more basic question, and even more tricky, namely: What do we mean by appealing to nature?

It’s about a year and a half since I began to be aware of Pankaj Mishra. To say that I’ve given more attention to his work than to any other writer / thinker’s in that time isn’t to say much, but this is fact. I haven’t however been following closely enough to have picked up on his involvement with Georgetown University’s two-year-old Global Dialogues project in that time. I’ve been neglecting in ignorance some good material.

The first of the series I encountered, a conversation between Mishra and Ece Temelkuran, happens to be the last of them published when I turned these up. (A conversation recorded evidently with the aim of signaling start of some new partnership between Global Dialogues and Equator, founded last year by a group of writers who include Mishra.) This is the video you’ll find below. Temelkuran, whom I confess I didn’t know of at all before coming to this recording, is also one of the small group convened in the very first recording in the series, significantly — a principal participant in the project.

I’ve now listened to this new conversation between Mishra and Temelkuran, put up in the last week of March, a number of times, and I’ll go back to it again. There’s a lot that might be said in response to it, in reflection on it.

Here, what I’ll say is extremely limited. At essence, it’s that I recommend listening to Temelkuran’s relatively brief conversation with Mishra together with another conversation published last month, only a week or so earlier, on the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast — see link below, before video. This second recording is relatively long, I’m afraid — and then, all but about a sixth (18 min.) is paywalled. Hey, I can’t tell you what to do.

‘We,’ Temelkuran says, ‘don’t accept defeat.’ What we is that? ‘As intellectuals, as progressives,’ she offers, casually — and you immediately catch a note of anachronism, and with it of degrees or valences of imprecision and indeterminacy. It pays to let this doubt, ‘What we?’, stay with you as you listen.

The anachronistic element owes in part to how Temelkuran tells the story of herself, beginning from her west-Asian, Mediterranean port-city home and from lives preceding and shaping hers. (Some interesting comparison to be drawn with Lea Ypi’s Balkan & Mediterranean background in family & culture.) Temelkuran is close in age to me and to Mishra (I’m between them), and all her formative experience stands — in every obvious thing, at least — in stark contrast to mine. For me, to hear her begin from her past, this history in family and place, is riveting.

Malekafzali is U.S.-born but from secular-left western Asian roots (on one parent’s side) and, although a generation younger than Temelkuran, accounts for his own life in a way likewise sprung emphatically from memory of lives of dissident and radical family members in that world far (geographically at least) from the U.S. during the latter half of the last century.

Like her, in a way, he too is very interested in a ‘we’ deeply habituated to refusal of identity with weakness and defeat, refusal of the place of the loser, and in where such refusal leads. Are they much the same, Temelkuran’s we and Malekafzali’s? There’s a lot more ‘they’ (U.S. and Israeli especially, but also e.g. Iranian) in his narrating of a problem ‘we’ than in hers, for instance, but from my point of view — especially facing in imagination the political dissident parents and grandparents Malekafzali and Temelkuran alike remember — not to bring close the two pictures, alternative portraits of the ‘undefeated’ I myself very unambiguously come from and live among, not to appreciate in these differing portrayals their common character, would be a pretty serious mistake.

[UPDATE (11 Apr. ’26): I’ve added below links to two articles written by Malekafzali and discussed in the Ordinary Unhappiness interview with him — one in Parapraxis, associated with the podcast, and the other in Equator.]

My social background of origin, the world of my family, friendships and education into early adulthood, is a form of religious culture cast as outsider, marked strongly by walking-corpse fringe thought in matters scientific and historical and by a generalized undercurrent of working-class-identified anti- or counter-intellectualism. It happens to be a form of marginal culture with one (at least) foot ever planted paradoxically at the center of U.S. political power, never to more dismaying effect than under today’s Republican-Party-led state and federal governments. This fact owes, of course, in great part to its predominate demographic whiteness, as also to ideological whiteness.

That this U.S.-rooted conservative Evangelicalism is however far from racially uniform is, in North America (as reflected, say, in student populations of institutions like Regent or Biola) and world-wide, without doubt one of its more important features. The phenomenon of its cultural marginal-ness or counter-ness, perceived from within but also from without, can’t be so neatly accounted for.

For me, it’s useful to have that in mind on coming to the very different, indeed opposite — if not in every way entirely separate — socially marginal, religion-inflected twentieth-century alternative-culture emergent that two political-left video essayists, F.D Signifier and Lil Bill, take up together in a joint commentary project published about a year ago on YouTube and Nebula. This development in American life, their subject, while comparatively very narrow in demographic-spectrum terms, is one likewise resistant to straightforward explanation. (It has had likewise, moreover, in arts and media especially, remarkable mainstream-culture impact — in some respects much larger than apparent wealth or institutional underpinnings associated with it might lead one to suppose it should have.)

To be clear here, what F.D Signifier and Lil Bill are about in their paired videos isn’t some sort of documentarian endeavor. It’s history-telling, yes, but to a complex political-education end. They’re offering an intro to Black radical thought in America and, to an extent, to America through Black-radical lens — a subject I continue in a lot of ways to experience as new but am here not for the first time taking occasion to attend to in posts on this site.

I catch F.D Signifier mainly on Nebula, and it’s his piece I encountered first, there, only in the last few weeks. You can view it via YouTube at bottom of this post (where I’ve set it to start mid-way through, at a key transition point). It’s long. But my recommendation is that you don’t stop with that one. Watch both. Link to Lil Bill’s video is also below.

Lil Bill goes hard at the close of his video; you really should listen to the whole. Here’s part of his wind-up toward the end:

There’s a not insignificant number of folk who have more faith in white allyship than Black solidarity. And y’all see where that got us, right? The thing is, hoteps aren’t stupid, it’s just a lot of them believe some really stupid stuff — and, again, whose fault is that? And — again — y’all made that excuse for white folks, and you see where that got us, right? Y’all might say it’s not your job to educate them on what’s a simple Google search away. But again, for how long have we wasted energy on supposedly well-meaning whites before finally throwing the towel in on them. And I still see some of y’all, even after what has transpired . . . , still wringing your hands over how to pull your suburban white male co-workers far enough left to cast a vote for anyone besides a white man with dementia for once. . . .

As Fanon argues, the Black bourgeoisie assimilated the culture of the colonizer, and as a result have learned disdain for schools of Black thought . . . but, more importantly, for people who adhere to those schools of thought, i.e. poor and working-class people. . . . The reality is, hoteptry, if anything, is an indictment against those who despise it most.

‘Interested especially in the publishing and communications needs of small businesses and organizations grounded in community’ is verbiage I’ve had at the top of my LinkedIn profile for a few years. To present, it bears only limited relation to paid work I’ve been fortunate to get, but it’s very true characterization regardless and is adequate, let’s say, to the purposes of LinkedIn.

Utility of the expression on LinkedIn aside, what it even is to be ‘grounded in community’ would be hard to say, of course. Community is one of our problem words. In all sorts of people’s experience — all through history, without doubt, and perhaps in special ways as generalized condition of modernity — to be or fail to be sustained in community is likewise a major problem. Certainly I can speak to aspects of the difficulty in my own life.

One tangle of pathways by which I’m continually challenged in taking hold in one or another scene of community stems from the fraying, progressively over many years and changes of place, of my adherence / adhesion across the spectrum of conservative ideological tenets and identifiers, and with it from increasing leftward affinity and affiliation. ‘Grounded’ in particular can be elusive as life is political.

I am in any case member of various groups and organizations, actively involved to the degree I can be — among them for some time now a labor union in the sphere of media work. Something this involvement exposes me to in new ways, in some sense bringing me ‘into community with’ while simultaneously heightening my outsider sensibility toward, is queer politics and sociality. Lately, that’s meant a modest beginning of appreciation for LGBT (hey, 2SLGBTQIA+) journalism at local / regional scale.

Below, I highlight a couple of recent items reflecting collaboration and fellow boosting among a number of independent media projects in the U.S. — the principal thing a late-December This News Is So Gay conversation with blogging veterans Sue Kerr and Mark King. That episode was followed early this month by a seven-part News Is Out capsule series (published via This News Is So Gay), ‘The Map of Us,’ designed to image a wonderfully stubborn greater North American queer news-market ecosystem’s spread and mix, which I’ve linked separately and which I take it as sort of preface-companion to.

The ‘map’ portrayal offered there stands strikingly in opposition, for me at least, to another item landing in recent months, one I come to in part thanks to my older connections and which I advert to in this post only to recognize as peculiar element of a wider contrary sociopolitical backdrop. I’m referring to essays in a ‘post-liberal’ and, further, (as I understand it, limitations acknowledged) a ‘post-queer’ vein, joined under ironic title Inversion and premised to great extent on doubt about, or rather perhaps on distaste for, meanings or implications of the usage community that ‘The Map of Us’ would seem to spring from urgency to affirm. For something of its flavor, you might listen to a contributor my circles have overlapped with in past, currently on Catholic-right publication Compact’s masthead, talking with collection editors Pierre d’Alancaisez and Amir Naaman on his own podcast.

This antagonism in politics-and-language terms is complex and deserves separate attention. I don’t mean to broad-brush. But the weight, in my eyes now, of all the variously common un-straight folks in conflicted but insistent and fertile weaving of fragile human mutualities that give rise to a market-currents object like ‘The Map of Us’ is enormous set against the Inversion essayists’ pallid natural-order-realist denial politics and cultural nostalgism. Call me a liberal I guess.

[UPDATE (2 Apr. ’26): Noting belatedly that an episode of Minneapolis radio’s The Gaily Show, one of the local media operations The Map of Us profiles, was devoted to an interview about the project with its producer-host Dana Piccoli in mid-March. Link appended below.]

Shadi Hamid isn’t someone whose work I’ve ever been much a consumer of. I don’t find the variety of liberal-ideal commitment one associates with him especially interesting, partly because it has for me in so many ways the odor, a little bit paradoxically, of Christian-West right-liberal culture of my own background. (In what kind of contrast Hamid really stands with those whose liberal-ideal commitments I have felt helped in thinking about, e.g. Vlad Vexler, is a question I would gladly give time to with opportunity, on the other hand.) But following Hamid ‘on social’ plays a small part in what is an attempted blogging turn of importance to me here, a few years ago, toward more deliberate concern with American and global liberal-order phenomena and fascistic continuity. I don’t compulsively ignore him.

Hamid, touring new book, guests this month on the Thinking Muslim podcast, it happens — an oppositional voice in a setting shaped principally by such perspectives as that of Sami Hamdi (like Hamid an anglophone-Western child of North African émigrés), whose recent detention in the U.S. on trumped-up visa-violation charges, a borders-enforcement bone thrown to G.O.P. Islamophobes, led me to a rare post of greater length in November. A Hamdi-Hamid head-to-head would be something! — though you can imagine it bringing more heat than light. What Thinking Muslim gives listeners in fact, in this episode, is cordial but not uncontentious exchange, Hamid interviewed by U.S.-born, ethnically Christian-Italian convert to Islam Tom Facchine, ‘Imam Tom.’

Find that recording at bottom of post as usual. Here’s an excerpt from shortly after introductions, suggestive of circling-around and recursion in the conversation throughout:

TF:I think a lot of people might accept that, the general notion that, that power is required for morality to exist. Um, I think the open-ended question is: What is the nature of American power, or Does American power have a particular nature — how plastic is it, right, um, or is there something in its DNA that makes it particularly um ill-suited, right, for, for true morality? There’s a separate question whether whatever would replace it is worse, right, but I think the first question is Is American power such that — because, because even just leftists, not even Muslims, leftists will say, America was founded on the, [on] slavery, and the extermination of Native Americans; so, What about American power is redeemable? Like, why do we, why do we expect that American power in particular can be redeemed from this sort of, uh, ‘original sin’ of, . . .

SH:Yes.

TF:. . . of the American state or project? Is it just a bunch of high-falutin’ language, and idealistic language? Uh a cynic would say that this is just a legitimizing discourse for really a more sinister game that’s going on. How would you like respond to that?

SH:Well I think, first of all, one thing that should be — maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s not: I’m an American; if we’re Americans, this is our country, so, at some level, we have to want it to be better. It’s, I think there’s something very odd about being an American who is secretly wishing for America’s demise, and, um, I just wouldn’t want American Muslims to, to lean in that direction.

TF:Is there a third option, though? Is there, like — ’Cause I get you, yeah, I mean like there’s some people that are calling for, like, an accelerationist — like, We want it to all fall apart.

SH:Exactly.

TF:But — You think that there’s probably a middle ground in there? where they’re saying, well, right now we have American power, it’s, it’s hegemonic, um, it’s funding and producing the genocide in Gaza, it’s intervened in over twenty countries since World, since the end of World War Two, right, um — that, maybe that a, a defanging, or a, a degree of defanging, could at least create — people talk about ‘multipolarity.’ Like — that there’s a middle ground, maybe, is there a middle ground in between having America as the hegemon that’s running everything and therefore our only hope is to, is to redeem this, this force? or American demise? Maybe there’s something in the middle of those.

SH:Look, there could be. I think it’s hard to see — How would the defanging of America actually work, and who would gain more power as a result of that — and that goes back to the question of who the competitors are and whether they’re worse or better, and I think that they’re worse, China, Russia, other authoritarian powers.

But to go back to your previous question, which is really important I think: We are, for, for all of our original sins, America is, I believe, founded on a set of moral ideas and convictions that are universally appealing. Now, we haven’t always lived up to them. But we have lived up to them sometimes.

TF:Give some examples maybe, for the skeptic.

[ laughter ]

SH:Yeah, well! I mean, the very fact that my parents chose to come here — and so many people who have, who are born and raised in authoritarian regimes say, at the end of the day, We want to get out of our, we don’t want to live in our countries anymore because they are oppressive and don’t have opportunities . . .

TF:Right —

SH:. . . and then oftentimes America is the choice, because they see that America offers that promise of freedom and opportunity — unlike other Western, European countries, the fact that you can become American. And to see my own parents, the process of them becoming American has been a beautiful thing to see. . . . The beautiful thing about the American project is that you can actually become American. And that’s in part because of our founding documents that allow for that process — the Declaration of Independence, um, the Constitution, are documents that really enshrine certain moral ideals that provide an open space for people to come into America, if they subscribe to American ideals and the American project — and anyone can do that, it’s not ethnically or, or religiously based. And the fact that, also, America is religiously open, that you can be fully practicing as a Muslim and that doesn’t detract from your Americanness — that again is a very unique thing.

Also, and this is maybe more controversial: The world did get better post-World War Two. So, kind of coinciding with American dominance and hegemony . . .

TF:For who? — did it get better?

SH:Oh, for the world more broadly. I think, if you look at . . .

TF:You think, like, the whole, in general. . . .

(Nice for comparison: older and younger members of the secular-left Jewish Currents community clashing on religious inheritance and the idea of common American identity, a June 2024 brief item.)

Reporting by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain in a succession of Drop Site News articles over a number of weeks since September is background to a new podcast conversation between Jewish Currents editorial head Arielle Angel, Grim, and long-time Currents writer Noah Kulwin. ‘Was Epstein Mossad?’ isn’t so much a thing to get hung up on, it’s in reality straightforward to see, as one finds it necessary to appreciate this picture of Davos players and back-channel expediencies in which Israel’s is of course one government whose members will figure prominently.

AA:There’s . . . this great line, Noah, in the piece that you published with Ari Brostoff in 2019, that says, ‘Rather than endlessly tracing these webs of influence, we might do better to just listen for ideological echoes.’ I love that line in terms of how to understand some of this stuff.

And I’ve been thinking of Epstein almost a little bit as a cipher, like as I’ve been reading these Drop Site pieces, in the sense that Epstein is the conduit for a lot of this stuff and he is directing some of this stuff in certain kinds of ways, but he’s almost just the mirror of the flow — like, the way that we see the flow of power in action. You know, there’s so many other different interests, obviously, being represented, and he’s extremely interesting just in terms of what he tells us about our world and how he reflects it back to us in all of its sordidness. And, you know, obviously like he’s an individual who did really terrible things, but for me, like, in terms of the way the story operates, you go through, in the Drop Site pieces, whole sections without mentioning Epstein. Because so much of like what is set in motion by a meeting then takes on a life of its own and has its own impacts in the world. . . .

NK:One thing that I think is really helpful as well is also to consider that Epstein-like figures have existed before. Like it’s a, almost, an archetype, to consider the person he most reminds me of is a guy named Sidney Korshak, who was the Chicago Mob’s big L.A. fixer. He was this really infamous figure, everybody was connected to him. And there’s a great book about him called Supermob. And one of the things that it gets at is the idea that stuff like organized crime, and that figures like a Korshak or, in today’s age, an Epstein, these essential conduits — to use your word, Arielle — are a key part of explaining how the world works today. . . . There’s a way in which, I think, today, again, in a more globalized society, in a society where ownership and the assetization makes this kind of influence a little bit different — you see the sort of power-brokering, though, emerge in these similar kinds of underground criminal networks, however you want to call them.

But rather than . . . get caught up, trying to determine ‘Who’s the real Jeffrey Epstein, what was he really doing? . . . ,’ instead of trying to come up with some distinct, singular truth, in the Robert Caro sense perhaps, to me it’s been helpful to think about — in the context of all of this reporting and all the specific facts we’re learning, that, like, these are evidence of how these kinds of criminal, power-broker, underworld overlord type figures operate — . . . that it also, you know, it doesn’t make us cynical to see that people like this exist and operate, you know, free from democratic and public vision and control, but that it does, like, sharpen our understanding of how it is that the ruling class and how the power elite are able to maintain that power and propagate it. ’Cause people like Jeffrey Epstein would not exist were he not viewed as indispensable toward that end by the highest, most powerful people in our society.

Listen to the whole (44 min.):

[UPDATE (6 Dec. ’25): Currents has followed the Epstein episode with one on Israel’s place in global trade in arms and enforcement systems, ‘Debating the “Palestine Laboratory,”’ a good companion listen — link below.]

A great gift to me two summers ago was a recommendation from a friend, a fellow ChiCommoner, to check out something Pankaj Mishra had written. (An LRB essay, chances are, though it might have been Age of Anger. I don’t remember.)

Toward end of year, a handful of his books under my belt, I was saying here that I wanted to start devoting space in posts to the thought and writing Mishra’s considerable reputation today owes to. A year later, now, I haven’t done that. Indeed I’ve been failing for months even to get to the little book he must have been at work on about then, February’s The World After Gaza.

As to that, at least, just in the last week I’ve turned corner. This is thanks particularly to John Ganz’s newsletter / blog Unpopular Front and its new move in a podcasting direction, inaugurated with Mishra interview. That recorded conversation is very good — see link at bottom (or, for present anyway, download file, 36 MB).

Here, an excerpt from mid-way through:

PM:The impulse to resist oppression is obviously something that cannot be disapproved of. I mean it’s something we have to support. But at the same time, we have to be extremely wary when that impulse becomes a desire to create political institutions and arrangements which in turn will be oppressive to another set of people.

And so I mean, I’m, you know, I find myself somewhat at a distance from people in Europe and America who criticize Israel from an anti-colonialist point of view. For me it’s a very dated perspective, because, you know, if you’ve lived long enough in India, you know we have moved very far away from anti-colonialism. We have gone through a whole cycle of historical experience, which has made anti-colonialism seem like a very inadequate perspective. I think we have to learn now from the experience of postcolonial nations. It’s, it’s not enough to say that the answer to, uh, the Israeli violence and oppression is another Palestinian state. We have to already foresee the problems that Palestinian state will have.

JG:Yeah.

PM:So we have to be a lot more imaginative than just thinking of Palestinian national sovereignty in simplistic ways. At the same time, you know, I think, when you’re facing that kind of genocidal violence, I think a lot of those, a lot of these kinds of conversations have to be shelved. Like, we are, you know — people are literally fighting for their lives. And, and, you know, but at the same time, for those of us who are not actually you know directly involved in these battles — for intellectuals, for historians — they certainly have to keep talking about these things. That’s, that’s certainly what I’m trying to do.

JG:I think that, you know, some of the most interesting figures you talk about in your book made the decision, even — so, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Kohn a little bit before, Hannah Arendt directly after the Holocaust — they made the decision — which I think was a very difficult one, when the urgency was felt among Jews that said, ‘Well yes, you know, maybe there’ll be problems down the road but we just went through this, so we can’t think about this’ — and they actually did the hard work of thinking about what the future might entail. And now their work seems prophetic. But it perhaps wasn’t that hard to see how things would develop.

And yeah, your point is really taken about the, the anti-colonial side of this. I mean, I, the status of Israel as a post-colonial state is complex, because on the one hand it was fold-, it’s folded into a friendly relationship with the, with imperial powers; on the other hand, you know, the dominant ideology of Israel now, this revisionist Jabotinsky-ite wing, you know, they, they, they were terrorists against the British, and they thought they were throwing off the British yoke. And they have some, some claim to being an anti-colonial movement, although they were themselves settler-colonialist.

So I think the entire, this conflict in particular, with the histories of the peoples involved, perhaps confounds and should be a place to put aside some of those easier narratives of resistance to colonialism, or ‘This is an outpost of civilization,’ or ‘This people has a right to a certain degree of violence because of their past’ — in a way it’s this knot of all these historical problems. And I think this is why — I mean there are other reasons that are material reasons — but certainly why it kind of, a conflict in this part of the world kind of pains the heart of the entire world, because it points to all of these contradictions. And I would hope — and I’ve been struggling to articulate and to convince people of this — that perhaps some of the terms should be abandoned, because we can see what they lead to.

That I couldn’t have told you, had you asked, who style commentator Derek Guy is before this weekend says about me I guess a number of things, not all of them necessarily to my discredit. I’m fortunate, anyhow, in having mentioned yesterday to a friend that I was listening to the new Ordinary Unhappiness episode, Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele featuring, and having learned in turn from him of Guy’s just-published Nation article on what leading Republican party types are wearing these days. (Links to both at bottom.)

From this I found my way to the podcast conversation Toby Buckle recorded with Guy and published in two parts last year. It’s that that I mean to recommend particularly with this post.

I’m not quite nerd enough — unlike Guy! — to have known Buckle’s podcast, Political Philosophy, already. I believe I’ll be giving it more attention in days to come. But this extended interview is for me something of a gift by itself, a boost to thoughts I’ve tried to give expression to in longer posts over a few years’ span now, wondering about fascistic (re)turn in coexistence with liberal order/society/culture (or just ‘the liberal,’ as I kind of prefer to put it).

Partly that’s about finding my appreciation stoked (or refreshed) for the central significance in each, the liberal and the fascistic, of aesthetic currents and conflicts — territory of question I’m in some ways unusually attuned to but feel even so, always, a great personal poverty in resources for talking about well.

Not to suggest that it’s issues aesthetic that really fuel this discussion between Guy and Buckle. Not at all — and what the burning issues in it are is another thing for coming back to elsewhere.

Bridget Read’s Little Bosses Everywhere, from Crown Books in May, and Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job, January from Harvard UP, cover an awful lot of shared ground. I’ve read neither. I’ll hazard a guess that they are pretty different reads. There is at any rate under present circumstances more than room, it’s fair to say, for two on this turf.

In the usual way, I’m getting to know the material through author interviews. Absent from the promo-tour media rounds, as far as I can tell, is anything bringing Read and Baker together to discuss their common subject with each other. Can’t help wondering how such a conversation might go! Anyway, down below is a little collection of their podcast chats I’ve benefited from time with, two with Read and two with Baker. (Many more out there to be found, of course.)

Added to these four is one interview with another author, Cara Wallis, about recent work of entirely distinct focus through which, interestingly, you can get a glimpse of Read’s and Baker’s shared subject from alternative angle — less historical in outline and decidedly less bound up with the U.S. culturally.

Also below, last, is video of a scholarly talk Baker delivered at Columbia U. in spring 2023, while his book was still in the works.

But first, an excerpt not from that 2023 lecture but from Baker’s visit with Know Your Enemy guys Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell this January (first of the podcast episodes I list at end of the post):

EB:The way that I stage it is to kind of try to show the way that these very eminent social scientists are kind of having this similar debate among themselves about the kind of predominance of material reality or intellectual ideational reality that these sort of New Thought charlatans are having, but you know of course in a much more elevated register. So one thing to note is that, even though this is a peculiarly American story in some ways, the underlying forces at work in capitalism are of course replicated in all kinds of national contexts, including in Germany — which at the time is undergoing its own experience of industrialization, the formation of a mass working class — and so, just as there are in the United States, there are social scientists who are trying to figure out the best way to deal with the social problems that result from these processes. So there’s a similar kind of debate — you know, if we want to understand what is driving history in the biggest sense, but more particularly sort of driving the emergence of, of labor movements, making workers unhappy: Should we, sort of, focus on their material circumstances, or you know should we kind of focus on their cultural or intellectual world? And the social scientists who are, who are interested in subjective experience, they’re really into this figure of, in German, the Unternehmer, which is, is translated to English via French as entrepreneur . . . and you know there’s this, of course, you know a lot of these guys are readers of, of Nietzsche, and you know they have this vision of this strong, charismatic leader who’s able to kind of go above material circumstances, you know, create a new reality and sort of conjure up this kind of environment of passionate commitment to a shared project.

MS:Erik, is this foreshadowing anything? [ laughter ]

EB:In Germany?! In early twentieth-century Germany? No I, there, there’s nothing that really comes to mind!

SAB:I have no idea what you’re talking about.

EB:You definitely do not want to look up what political party Werner Sombart supported in the 1930s at the end of his life. [ laughter ] No, right, so I mean the, it’s kind of stereotypical, but you know, at the time, people don’t fully know where this story is going. And, and so this vision is taken up in American business schools — and, you know, often by people who actually are quite frankly sympathetic with these political projects of the, the European far right. And this becomes an opportunity — again, there are other figures in management theory who are focused on, on the material reality, whether that’s compensation, or some of the sort of physical details of the conditions that people work under — but, uh, this vision of the entrepreneur gets taken up as a way to say, you know, If we have the right kinds of people in, in management — again, it’s all about kinds of people — you know if we have the right kinds of people with the right sorts of virtues and, and capacities, you know, then it’s possible to sort of spiritually transform the workplace — to sort of turn it into a place that’s kind of energized, again, by this sort of shared commitment, you know: We’re creating something new here. And so again, that’s sort of where it links up with this broader popular culture of, of success.

SAB:And the important thing obviously is to get people invested — via their, say, dedication to a charismatic leader — in a corporate project which is not, you know, horizontally solidaristic, right?

The greater narrative Read and Baker complement each other in, here, is complex, subject naturally in many ways to varied interpretation. Both tend to talk about the New Thought phenomenon, say, in terms I’m not so sure are satisfactory. (Something maybe to return to in a longer post sometime.) Crowded and diverse though their story is, in any event, we might observe that among characters taking the stage in it, in demonstrations of real personal virtue it would seem to prove, not surprisingly from present vantage, rather thin.

A thought you may find recurring, should you give these discussions some time: What if American labor at its strength in the 1930s and ’40s had transcended trade-unionism and pressed the fight for all workers — had really dug in, had insisted that none is protected until all are?

I don’t play the guitar. I do however find myself (an ex-carpenter who misses his tools and shop space) strongly drawn to the vast ‘creator’-content genre of guitar making and repair. For eight or so years now, my weekend includes without fail Hamilton Ontario luthier Ted Woodford’s Sunday release, and usually one by New Haven-area’s Tim Sway, at least (though I have cut back). I’ve learned a lot this way.

Writer on comics Zach Rabiroff is in Flaming Hydra last week with a fun interview with Billy Bragg, in youth a fan of comic books American and Brit. The image of Bragg the piece uses (hard to say why) is this two-decade-old photo from Wikimedia:

Though I’ve wound up later in life the kind of person whose political-things ideas you’d associate with Bragg’s, I have no history of listening to him. (For my youthful music-consumption-as-identity, a long time ago — I’m a dozen-plus years Bragg’s junior — there was instead a pretty different working-middleclass-audiences guy with guitar and a two-plus-one-syllable name, born, as it happens, the same year as Bragg.)

Anyway, Rabiroff mentions Bragg’s playing a Telecaster. The guitar in the pic is Tele-like, of course, but plainly something else. If I knew Bragg, I might have recognized that this is the same guitar he’s always on stage with now. But I don’t. Curiosity led me to dig a little bit. Turns out that this is a guitar by Australian Jim Dyson, a relative rarity. (People who get into this sort of thing may appreciate a short conversation with Dyson recorded about the time he was giving up the business.)

The short item I really mean to advert to (below) in present post is one Bragg participated in the making of last year — one not about him but about a guitar build. Chances are that this is a build video (a Duck Duck Go search return for me on ‘Billy Bragg guitar’) I’d have never stumbled across apart from getting curious about that old photo of him, above, with main live-date axe. The production on this thing is first-rate, but view numbers, for whatever reason, are quite low — a want my posting it here will do little to help, sadly.

What’s lovely about this is the people and place you get a glimpse of, an evidently well-loved, busy community space in small-city UK, in Gloucestershire a little way from Bristol. How fortunate to be part of that scene, to share in the experience of such a group.