liberal grooming, if you know what i mean

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.