'See you later, Max.'

The resentment people have for critics is goofy. You already “won” you can consume as much content slop as you want without ever having to have a critical thought in your head

— david drake (@somanyshrimp) July 5, 2023

Ryan Ruby: oh, but it makes perfect sense: the criticism of a work of art is implicitly a criticism of a way of life. this is what gives criticism its stakes. people's resentment towards critics is both an acknowledgment of its importance and the highest compliment that can be paid to them.

Corey Robin: Kind of reminds me of what George Steiner said about the KGB: that no one took literature more seriously than they did.

Ruby: Perhaps it's self-flattery, but I've always been sympathetic to this observation--and have from time to time wondered if the most perfect form of censorship is paradoxically that people should be free to say whatever they like because language itself does not matter.

Robin: Don't tell anyone I said this, but I kind of agree.

Ruby: your secret is safe with me (and the internet)

Robin: That and similar arguments of his produced this epic conversation on British television between him, Mary McCarthy, and Joseph Brodsky. One of those things you stumble across on YouTube late at night, when you can't sleep. 

 

Ruby: never seen this! luckily, I expect to be facing a night when I can't sleep in the very near future. (also: al alvarez: there's a name you don't hear too often any more.)

repeats

Kant, What is Enlightenment

Thus we observe here as elsewhere in human affairs, in which almost everything is paradoxical, a surprising and unexpected course of events: a large degree of civic freedom appears to be of advantage to the intellectual freedom of the people, yet at the same time it establishes insurmountable barriers. A lesser degree of civic freedom, however, creates room to let that free spirit expand to the limits of its capacity. 

de Maistre

Everything that constrains a man, strengthens him.

"This guy was out here, one of the head honchos, and he was upset -- what was it? -- oh, yeah -- because Billy Al Bengston was racing motorcycles at the time. This critic just dismissed that out of hand as a superficial, suicidal self-indulgence. And I said you can't do that. We got going and ended up arguing about folk art. He was one of those Marxist critics who like to think they're real involved with the people, making great gestures and so forth, but they're hardly in the world at all. Anyway, he was talking about pot-making and weaving and everything, and my feeling was that that was all historical art but not folk art. As far as I'm concerned, a folk art is when you take a utilitarian object, something you use everyday, and you give it overlays of your own personality, what it is you feel and so forth. You enhance it with your life. And a folk art in the current period of time would more appropriately be in the area of something like a motorcycle. I mean, a motorcycle can be a lot more than just a machine that runs along; it can be a whole description of a personality and an aesthetic.

"Anyway, so I looked in the paper, and I found this ad of a guy who was selling a hot rod and a motorcycle. And I took the critic out to this place. It was really fortunate, because it was exactly what I wanted. We arrived at this place in the Valley, in the middle of nowhere, and here's this kid: he's selling a hot rod and he's got another he's working on. He's selling a '32 coupe, and he's got a '29 roadster in the garage. The '32 he was getting rid of was an absolute cherry. But what was more interesting, and which I was able to show this critic, was that here was this '29, absolutely dismantled, I mean, completely apart, and the kid was making decisions about the frame, whether or not he was going to cad plate certain bolts or whether he was going to buff grind them, or whether he was going to leave them raw as they were. He was insulating and soundproofing doors, all kinds of things that no one would ever know or see unless they were truly a sophisticate in the area. But, I mean, real aesthetic decisions, truly aesthetic decisions. Here was a fifteen-year-old kid who wouldn't know art from schmart, but you couldn't talk about a more real aesthetic activity than what he was doing, how he was carefully weighing: what was the attitude of this whole thing? What exactly? How should it look? What was the relationship in terms of its machinery, its social bearing, everything? I mean, all these things were being weighed in terms of the aesthetics of how the thing should look. It was a perfect example.

"The critic simply denied it. Simply denied it: not important, unreal, untrue, doesn't happen, doesn't exist. See, he comes from a world in New York where the automobile . . . I mean, automobiles are 'What? Automobile? Nothing.' Right? I mean, no awareness, no sensitivity, no involvement. So he simply denied it: 'It doesn't exist.' Like that: 'Not an issue.' Which we argued about a little on the way back over the Sepulveda pass.

"I said, 'How can you deny it? You may not be interested, but how can you deny it? I mean, there it is, full blown, right in front of you, and it's obviously a folk art!'

"Anyway, he, 'No, no.'

"So I finally just stopped the car and made him get out. I just flat left him there by the road, man, and just drove off. Said, 'See you later, Max.'"

The Sharjah Biennial is less art than style sold on money and lies. Without either there'd be only a smaller regional audience, and who knows what you'd find under the surface.  Film festivals in Iran are more serious, because more local, and because films, like books, aren't luxury commodities, so conspicuous consumption is effect not cause.

repeats  

David Drake is a flabby white suburbanite out of the Simpsons, now in Brooklyn, who writes about hip hop. The black teenagers who invented it didn't need a critics's permission, and neither did their friends.  The relation of artists to critics is adversarial, but critics are a byproduct not a cause. And it's not news that culture is richest where repression leaves room or is giving way. 

repeats: Steiner, Panofsky and Benjamin;  Steiner and Robin, and Farrell and Scialabba. Steiner is obviously conflicted, or he separates art from its audience: the people who make it represent freedom; their audience, including critics, are seduced, "and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room."  Steiner could have been referring to himself; he had a fraternal bond with fragile bookworms, reactionary romantics of the library.

An artist has no necessary obligation to "what is best", only to the truth of experience, including the experience of lying, cheating and killing. And when the interview was first shown Alvarez had just published The Biggest Game in Town. I had no idea a British literary critic is responsible for the rise of Poker. Serendipity/The Ghost of Panofsky: Robert Irwin—above, explaining art to an art critic—made a living as a gambler before he made one as an artist.

Art wasn't invented by pretentious college students, white fans of the blues, critics, philosophers, moralists, priests, or librarians with fantasies of what art is supposed to be.

The most fascinating point of all applies more broadly than to Godard; it reaches out to anyone who believes that film is more important than the world. Maybe film is not the great new language of engagement with the world that Bazin hoped it would be. Perhaps it is, instead, a vehicle more suited to dreaming, sensationalism and not wanting to grow up.

repeats. Ryan Ruby and Matthew Sitman defend snobbery.

And remember that Robin is famous for lumping Edmund Burke with the Republican du jour. He's changed the reference in the subhead from Palin to Trump. What next, The Reactionary Mind: An Autobiography?

Robin, back in the day:

I think people have lots of different interests, and I think an elitist project like conservatism actually offers non-elites certain opportunities for power (though power that is always allied/hitched to subjection), which is one of the reasons non-elites support it.

And now he's come out of the closet, and my response hasn't changed. 

Discovering the obvious/reinventing the fucking wheel, again and again and...

"my left-wing defence of Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’, or how capital’s controlled demolition of the public sphere in the 1980s and 1990s made society both more lonely and less fascist."

"In the six years since Donald Trump’s election, a waspish debate on whether he should be classified as a fascist has overtaken American and European academia. The January 6 riots proved shocking and unsurprising to these observers."

Academics quibbling about the meaning of fascism, without understanding the roots of fascism—Stanley and Robin are moralizing idiots. Meanwhile, Jan 6th was an attempted coup.

Weimar: elite alienation, intellectual distance, aestheticized politics, and passivity.

It's unlocked so I read the thing. Jesus.

Last year, the Survey Center on American Life published a study tracking friendship patterns in the United States. The report was anything but heartening. Registering a “friendship recession,” the report noted how Americans were increasingly lonely and isolated: 12 percent of them now say they do not have close friendships, compared to 3 percent in 1990, and almost 50 percent said they lost contact with friends during the COVID-19 pandemic. The psychosomatic fallout was dire: heart disease, sleep disruptions, increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The friendship recession has had potentially lethal effects.

The center’s study offered a miniaturized model of a much broader process that has overtaken countries beyond the United States in the last thirty years. As the quintessential voluntary association, friendship circles stand in for other institutions in our collective life — unions, parties, clubs. In his memoirs, French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa said that one of the most disconcerting moments of his childhood was the day he discovered that there were people in the village who were not members of the Communist Party. “That seemed unimaginable,” he recalled, as if those people “lived outside of society.” Not coincidentally, in May 1968, French students sometimes compared the relationship of workers to the Communist Party with that of Christians to the church. The Christians yearned for God, and the workers for revolution. Instead, “the Christians got the church, and the working class got the party.”

Branko again. No Fucking Shit, again.

Now, almost half-a-century later, as I was writing about the war, I realized how Marxism in that case really fulfilled the essential functions of a religion. 

 Ad infinitum, ad nauseam  

"Perhaps more than an ambiguity, it was an irony of history. The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution....

It was the strike, not the student revolt, that truly paralyzed the country for three long weeks. The paradox is that these two movements never encountered each other. The students marching toward the factories to “meet the workers” found the doors closed. The unions didn’t want them: the workers found the students disorganized and irresponsible." 

"What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won." 

Eric Rohmer

"I wasn’t hostile to May ’68, but whereas the people who participated in it saw it as a beginning, I saw it rather as an end. May ’68 was the first stone thrown into the pond of Marxism. The ideological collapse of Marxism began in ’68. Because I believe that May ’68, paradoxically, cured many people, including perhaps me, of communism and anticommunism. I think that the kind of Marxist fever that took place after May ’68 carried within it its condemnation and its end, it was a last flare-up."

--- 

12/11

And again, remembering the obvious, because I've used it so many times: Branko the jackass. I'd forgotten he even makes the reference!

Is the life where we “bowl alone”, dine alone, exercise alone, go to concerts alone, live alone our ultimate objective? It seems to be the case....

Being alone is both our preference and a response to a world of competitiveness, commodification and higher incomes. The new world that we can glean will not be dystopian. It will be a Utopia, with a twist.

And maybe this is why Leusder just shut down his Soundcloud account. Klub kid wants to grow up.

---

12/6  more later, yes.

An absolutely must read piece by Anton Jäger. It offers an eye opening contemporary reflection on Putnam’s Bowling Alone—the 20th anniversary of which strangely received little attention (until now): https://t.co/9CQzf21v8i

— Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (@daniel_dsj2110) December 6, 2022

Jäger, Nov 8 

I’m in this spicy new issue with a left-wing defence of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone — assessing the argument twenty years later, and how the book still speaks to our era of class dealignment and resurgent ‘fascism’.

Because Putnam's obvious points in earnest language weren't spicy the first time; only their rediscovery by intellectual edgelords years makes them hot. 

---

12/5 more later maybe.

2016

Americans and Europeans share many things: a commitment to fundamental democratic principles, a strategic alliance that has shaped the world order for more than half a century, and despite serious economic challenges in recent years, some of the highest living standards in the world. Still, there are notable differences across the Atlantic. As our polling has found over the years, Americans and Europeans often have different perspectives on individualism, the role of government, free expression, religion and morality.

 2017 

There's an apparent paradox in modern life: Society as a whole is getting smarter, yet we aren't any closer to figuring out how to all get along. "How is it possible that we have just as many, if not more, conflicts as before?" asks social psychologist Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

The answer is that raw intelligence doesn't reduce conflict, he asserts. Wisdom does. Such wisdom—in effect, the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise—comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study by Grossman and colleagues.

"This work represents the cutting edge in wisdom research," says Eranda Jayawickreme, a social psychologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

 2018

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle-class counterparts, lower/working-class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self-concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working-class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working-class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle-class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working-class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working-class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. This means that redistributive policies are needed to break the cycle of deprivation that limits opportunities and threatens social cohesion.

2022

Psychologists have increasingly come to recognise the role that social and cultural factors play in shaping how we think and behave. While some human experiences may be universal, research has shown that the society we come from can have a profound influence on everything from our perception of music to the way we interpret emotions. 

There has been less of a focus on how social class is reflected in our psychology. And yet, a growing number of studies finds that much like our culture, our class background also influences our thoughts and behaviour. What’s more, research suggests that in a society where middle class norms and ways of thinking are prioritised, these differences can end up further disadvantaging individuals from lower-class backgrounds.

Class: A form of culture?

In some ways, class is a form of culture: people from different class backgrounds grow up in environments with particular norms and values, and this shapes their behaviour and sense of identity. For instance, note Michael W. Kraus and colleagues in their 2019 book chapter Social class as culture, for working class individuals the ‘self’ tends to be tied more to others, and there is an emphasis on strong social bonds. In contrast, middle class individuals tend to define themselves as separate from others and more focused on their own uniqueness. Young children are taught these identities from early on, the researchers write: middle class parents are more likely than working class parents to encourage their kids to speak up at school, for instance, or choose their own hobbies.

Alex Rosenberg now has a tag.

Consciousness tells us that we employ a theory of mind, both to decide on our own actions and to predict and explain the behavior of others. According to this theory there have to be particular belief/desire pairings somewhere in our brains working together to bring about movements of the body, including speech and writing. Which beliefs and desires in particular? Roughly speaking it’s the contents of beliefs and desires—what they are about—that pair them up to drive our actions. The desires represent the ends, the beliefs record the available means to attain them. It is thus that we give meaning to our actions, and make sense of what others do....

Several sources of evidence suggest that we have an innate mind-reading ability more powerful than other primates. It’s an ability to track other people’s actions that is triggered soon after birth.  Child psychologists have established its operation in pre-linguistic toddlers, while primatologists have shown its absence in other primates even when they exceed infants in other forms of reasoning. Social psychologists have established deficiencies in its deployment among children on the Autism spectrum. fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have localized a brain region that delivers this mind-reading ability. Evolutionary anthropology, game theory and experimental economics have established the indispensability of powerful mind reading for the cooperation and collaboration that resulted in Hominin genus’s rapid ascent of the African savanna’s food chain.

Humanity has converted this innate mind reading ability into a theory of mind with a powerful but nearly invisible role in our understanding of human action. We’ve built our cultural, legal and political institutions on this theory that people’s actions are caused by choices made rational in the light of their beliefs and their desires.

The theory of mind we all carry around with us almost since birth creates our craving for stories with plots, narratives about human achievements, with intriguing beginnings, tension filled middles, satisfying denouements. The taste for narrative driven by the theory of mind fosters our demands for history and for historical fiction—for stories–true or artfully created.

But here’s the problem: the theory of mind we call carry around with us and use every day has no basis in what neuroscience—Nobel Prize winning neuroscience–tell us about how the brain works. Neuroscience has revealed that the theory is quite as much of a dead end as Ptolemaic astronomy. It’s been around for such a longtime only because it was the predictive device natural selection came up with, in spite of being fundamentally mistaken about how things were really arranged.

I remember when Yasmina Reza's play Art was performed in the US, and discussion of the disconnect between French and American audiences, forms of male friendship, and the meaning of copain. 

Capitalism has never been that popular in France, and "Americans aren't social!"

I never argued with Rosenberg's determinism, only that he exempts himself. But if autism is the future, then the future is the the future of managers and the hive.

---

Jäger will always end up confirming that his preferences are not what he claims.

The ancient Greeks believed that the political realm was “the space of appearance,” wrote Hannah Arendt. Through political action, men acquired a public identity that was visible to other men; in the polis, they saw and were seen by others. Smith’s innovation was to locate that space of appearance in the economy. Why do we seek wealth, he wondered, losing ourselves in “all the toil and bustle of this world?” It is not to supply us with necessities, for “the wages of the meanest labourer can supply them.” What we want from wealth is “to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy.” The reason the rich man “glories in his riches” is that “he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.” He is “fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.” The poor person, by contrast, lives “out of the sight of mankind.”

The political realm in ancient Greece, according to Arendt, was the space for those who could afford it. In Smith's time they would be aristocrats, but Smith wrote about and for the bourgeoisie. 

The "cottages" in Newport were built for the nouveau riche, Carnagies and Rockefellers, to upstage old money living a few miles away, where a friend's uncle lives in an old house on land given to the family by the King. He parks his station wagon in the neighbors' driveway because it has more space. He's not interested in drawing your attention; he's interested in power, and he has it. 

Céline is my Proust II

Roth again

Corey Robin is an ass.

In 2014, the mystery writer Lisa Scottoline wrote an instructive essay for The New York Times about two undergraduate seminars she took with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. One of the courses was the literature of the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt was on the syllabus.

In his five-page discussion of those years at Penn, Roth biographer Blake Bailey makes no mention of this course or Arendt. Instead, he focuses on the other course, “The Literature of Desire,” and Roth’s erotic presence inside and outside the classroom. In the wake of the allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate behavior that have been made against Bailey, the omission may seem small or slight. Yet it is telling. As Judith Shulevitz argues in a searching analysis of the allegations and the biography, Bailey is as incurious about Jewishness as he is about the reality of women.

And that's why Roth chose him.  

Shulevitz

Mediocrity pervades the entire biography, not just the parts that have to do with women. Bailey credulously takes Roth’s side in fights with wives and lovers, but Roth had baggage in all domains of life, and Bailey, an eager bellhop, carries the whole load for him—the unhappy marriages and contentious divorces and relationships and affairs and everything else as well.

Bailey is tone-deaf about Jewishness, too. Unfamiliar with the subtleties of Jewish ambivalence about Jewish particularism, he doesn’t realize that Roth’s insistent rejection of the “Jewish writer” label is no simple claim. It requires unpacking. And Bailey doesn’t know how little he knows about Jewish history. Bailey uses Roth as his main source on the generations that came before Philip, even though Roth had only hazy knowledge of his Polish-born forebears and how they lived before they emigrated, and rarely wrote about the surely painful transition from Old World to New that would have shaped the childhood Roth idealized and rebelled against.

Roth’s lack of genealogical curiosity is curious. Here was a self-reflexive, confessional writer—or rather, meta-confessional writer, since he created alter egos to do the confessing for him—yet he didn’t start soliciting details about his grandparents from living relatives until late in life. Bailey’s incuriosity is curious too. What a reader wants from a biographer is to have blind spots like that pointed out. What didn’t Roth want to see, and why? And why didn’t Bailey realize that those were precisely the questions he was supposed to answer? 

...What I gleaned from Bailey’s book, despite its shortcomings, is that Roth’s woman problem was fundamentally a reality problem. Bailey quotes Roth talking about women as if they stood for something, which is very different from being somebody. Roth dated and married women who represented a place or class that was out of his reach and that he wanted to learn about or escape to. The most disastrous emissary from this fantastical out-there was his first wife, Maggie Martinson, a working-class single mother from small-town Michigan who told tales of childhood incest and had divorced her previous husband on the grounds of physical cruelty. Martinson brought him closer to “goyish chaos,” Roth said. After Martinson, Roth dated her opposite, a Pittsburgh socialite.* Both women appealed to him, he later wrote, because they were estranged “from the very strata of American society of which they were each such distinctively emblazoned offspring.” To turn that around, what they had in common was that, alienation notwithstanding, they served as emblems of exotic worlds. The trouble started whenever these “emblazoned offspring” piped up with actual human needs and desires.

...Bailey’s incuriosity made him an indifferent biographer. How Roth saw around his own blind spots well enough to produce a few great novels and memoirs (the rest range from good to terrible) is a mystery someone else will have to solve. I’m glad I got the chance to read the biography before Norton pulled it, because I have no doubt that if I were diving into it now, I’d mix scandal and biographer and biography into one confounding mess. But reading my suspicions about Bailey into the book now does make it easier to imagine how biographer and subject could have tapped into the worst parts of each other to construct a collective monument to un-self-awareness. And that, in turn, gives me a glimpse of how men collude to deny women reality and reduce them to inviting targets. In that sense, Bailey did this reader a service, though probably not the one he meant to perform.

"How Roth saw around his own blind spots well enough to produce a few great novels and memoirs (the rest range from good to terrible) is a mystery someone else will have to solve."

Shulevitz is better than Robin, but they both miss the point. 

No one will ever "solve" the mystery of Philip Roth or anyone else. Art is honesty, even of that means being more honest than you want to admit.

Do the Right Thing is the newest entry in the expanding catalog of films inspired by Italian-American family virtues. If it is less engaging than Moonstruck, it can be commended for the earnestness of its effort to convey the suffering and final defeat of a rational man by an irrational world.

Roth and "doubling". Arendt and Du Bois. Robin is too stupid to remember that Du Bois thought double-consciousness was a problem. 

I'll fix it later, or not.

---

The leftism of the educated bourgeoisie.  

when a dem loses it's because voters fear leftism.
when a dem wins it's because that dem rejected leftism.
when a dem wins but not by a ton it's because voters fear leftism but only by so much.

The working class is not "intersectional". They're on their own. 

"Tom Scocca was the “Off the Record” columnist and media editor for The New York Observer before decamping for Beijing. Before that, he was an editor and writer for Washington City Paper and Baltimore’s City Paper. A Baltimore native, he is settling in New York with his wife and son (a Beijing native). He writes the “Scocca” blog for Slate, and his byline appears regularly in the Boston Globe and The Awl."

repeats: "It's not only how much money you make, it's how you make your money." 

Arnade's greatest theme is his own self-pity.  He's rich; his photographs are poverty porn, and his book is blurbed by fascists. And electricians make more than adjuncts. Last year I spent an hour at my coffee shop chatting with an Ecuadorian electrician who'd just come back from 2 months in Italy, with his wife and 2 kids. In Venice he called a cousin in Naples. Then they went to Naples. He works his ass off and then takes a break. I remember when a Thai waiter I knew bought his first Mercedes, used, but clean. 

Cops are working class. Impoverished theologians are not. Every job I've ever had has been blue collar and I'm still not working class.

Liberals who backed the Clintons 15 years ago now call themselves socialists. They ignore their own history of mocking the proles.

In a hardware store a few blocks from my apartment, listening to a plumber curse to the man behind the counter about working on new apartments he can't afford, in the neighborhood he grew up in. The man behind the counter is a character with a history. Hipsters would worship him he wanted them to.

The best thing about the "The Squad" is their connection to community, too Burkean for Corey Robin.  

Of course it's all a mix of moralizing narcissists and the unpretentious, idealistic individualists singing "solidarity forever", and people who have ties to more than ideas. But as I've said a dozen times, Occupy Wall St is remembered and the Wisconsin protests are forgotten. The successes in this election have more to do with family restaurants than the people happy to burn them.

Farrell hasn't changed, nearly enough.

The conservative dilemma is straightforward: conservatism is not likely to be a politically popular cause in a democracy. Conservatism is the political movement that represents the interests of those who have against those who have not.

Political science is always behind the curve, but claims to lead.  Scholasticism is "path dependent"

repeats, or start here and work back.

Al-Ghazali, as quoted by Ernest Gellner, puts Mannheim’s point more pithily – "the genuine traditionalist does not know that he is one; he who proclaims himself to be one, no longer is one."

Maria Farrell is married to a career military officer, and prays every day for the health of the Pope. She's a traditionalist.

  Corey Robin: "I think people have lots of different interests, and I think an elitist project like conservatism actually offers non-elites certain opportunities for power (though power that is always allied/hitched to subjection), which is one of the reasons non-elites support it."

“...to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.”

Nice to see Henry's new post has been pretty much shut down by commenters.

Corey Robin

Why would a liberal opposed to the Hobbesian vision of absolute power resort to such a Hobbesian style of argument? Because Montesquieu, like Hobbes, lacked a positive conception of human ends, true for all people, in which to ground his political vision. Montesquieu’s liberalism was not the egalitarian liberalism of the century to come, nor was it the conscience-stricken protoliberalism of the century it had left behind. Unlike Locke, whose argument for toleration was powered by a vision of religious truth, and unlike later figures such as Rousseau or Mill, whose arguments for freedom were driven by secular visions of human flourishing, Montesquieu pursued no beckoning light.

Osita Nwanevu quotes David Brooks

The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow. This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

“Excessive realism”—a remarkable phrase in the service of a remarkable argument.

Count me in favor of excessive realism. Nwanevu is still more interested in "Truth".

Nwanevu restates Brooks' title blankly –“Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White”– all of them blind to the irony of a self-identified white man claims a right to return to the Middle East.

Watching high-achieving children of dark skinned immigrants, Nwanevu and Jilani, debating and celebrating the American Dream

The word “liberalism” has grown many bizarre and contradictory appendages and meanings over the years, particularly in the United States, but the original ideas central to it are fairly clear. Liberalism is an ideology of the individual⁠. Its first principle is that each and every person in society is possessed of a fundamental dignity and can claim certain ineradicable rights and freedoms. Liberals believe, too, in government by consent and the rule of law: The state cannot exercise wholly arbitrary power, and its statutes bind all equally.

Overall, the liberal ideal is a diverse, pluralistic society of autonomous people guided by reason and tolerance. The dream is harmonious coexistence. But liberalism also happens to excel at generating dissensus, and some of the major sociopolitical controversies of the past few years should be understood as conflicts not between liberalism and something else but between parties placing emphasis on different liberal freedoms⁠—chiefly freedom of speech, a popular favorite which needs no introduction, and freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values. Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

No mention of freedom of wealth and property, and libertarianism, the thread that links most of the people he's talking about.

The word “liberalism” has grown many bizarre and contradictory appendages and meanings over the years, particularly in the United States, but the original ideas central to it are fairly clear. 

They were never clear, or non-contradictory.

Within the present economy, more and more companies are beginning to make strategic and superficial concessions on race and other issues. How important can a movement be, it’s often been asked, if the most heinous corporations and institutions in the world can glom onto it and earn praise for meaningless statements and gestures?

They're not meaningless as all. Racism was once good for business, and now it's not.

Nwanevu has the most detailed LinkedIn page I've ever seen, and it's up to date. He got 710 on his English SAT and was a "Peer Trainer" with the ADL.
Jilani likes to point out the Nigerians are the most successful immigrant community in the US.

Jilani, and Williams quoting Julian Benda
Yes, you can work with people for years without drinking with them on the weekends. Black people work with racists.  Jews work with anti-Semites.

Nwanevu

All told, liberal society in the U.S. is, at best, just over half a century old: If it were a person, it would be too young to qualify for Medicare.

According to his LinkedIn page, Nwanevu maxed out every AP test but World History.  And in 2012 he was an intern for Tim Kaine.

The pro-looter activist from Common Dreams and LinkedIn is a Star Wars fan, a supporter of some billion dollar corporations but not others. And I remember when Star Wars and everything else about the Lucas fantasy world was criticized as authoritarian, and Star Wars itself as proto-fascist kitsch.

On twitter Ryan Cooper posted a screenshot to mock Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. Cooper has 53 thousand followers; Walsh's follower count has gone up 100 thousand in the past month. I told Cooper he should engage Walsh directly, so his followers could see the response.

Cooper replied: "Have you ever argued with a conservative? They won't learn anything no matter what I say or where I say it. Whatever I say is wrong by definition."

I told him it's not about Walsh but giving information to his readers that they wouldn't get otherwise. I told him I remember when very serious American left-liberals read Tyler Cowen and were afraid of Palestinians. I remember when they loved Bill Clinton.

Today he tweets this

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit

Left-wing secularists in Lebanon are in a bloc with Hezbollah. As a 22 year old Bulgarian club-kid said to me in 2006. "This is a stupid country."

repeats

Corey Robin: "I think people have lots of different interests, and I think an elitist project like conservatism actually offers non-elites certain opportunities for power (though power that is always allied/hitched to subjection), which is one of the reasons non-elites support it."

(etc.)

Ryan tweets images of cops on the rampage. Lee Fang—see below, here and here—tweets violence by looters. Neither are conservatives, right?

CNN: Killer Mike urges Atlanta protesters 'not to burn your own house down' in emotional plea.

Killer Mike made an emotional plea for calm Friday night as a protest in Atlanta against police brutality turned violent.

The demonstration started peacefully, but some protestors broke storefront windows, torched cars and vandalized CNN headquarters. Atlanta was one of several US cities that witnessed protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

"I am the son of an Atlanta police officer," said the rapper and activist, who was joined at a press conference by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Police Chief Erika Shields and fellow Atlanta rap star T.I. "My cousin is an Atlanta city police officer. And my other cousin an East Point police officer." 

"And I got a lot of love and respect for police officers, down to the original eight police officers in Atlanta," he said, an apparent reference to the city's first black officers, hired in 1948, who he said were forced to dress in a separate building because white officers rejected them. 

Killer Mike and T.I. pointed to Atlanta's civil rights history as the home of Martin Luther King Jr. and others who have struggled for equality over the decades. 

"I watched a white police officer assassinate a black man," Killer Mike said while crying, referring to Floyd's death. "And I know that tore your heart out."

The officer, since fired, is seen in a video with his knee on Floyd's neck. He has been charged with murder and manslaughter.

"I am duty-bound to be here to simply say that it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy," Killer Mike said. "It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization."

"It is time to beat up prosecutors you don't like at the voting booth," he added, as he wore a T-shirt that read "Kill Your Masters," a lyric from one of his rap group's songs. "It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs." 

"I'm mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday because I am tired of seeing black men die," he said. "We want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burned to the ground.

Two cheers for buppies and the black petty bourgeois.  I'm sure Killer Mike likes Star Wars. It's ok. I'll deal.

---

One month later: From Star Wars to Star Trek

Corey Robin and Jodi Dean again.
previously. Connecting to this

Solidarity,  among members of a group is not a decision; it's a reflex. The decision would be to refuse it, to chose to be disloyal, forms of which will make you  a "rat", a "snitch", or a "scab".

"What's the difference between a religion and a cult?" My usual and immediate answer is "time". The question is usually treated as a one-liner and I doubt I'm the first to reply as I do. But another way to put it is to say that for most adherents religion isn't a choice. For most Catholics, Catholicism is not an "intentional community". It's one they're born into.  The working class is not an intentional community. Workers are in the community of workers whether they like it or not. Unions put limits on personal freedom because the only defense of workers is collective.  Bourgeois liberalism and leftism, especially the American versions is the politics of idealism and choice. Joseph Raz says we have a choice whether or not to have children, ignoring that children don't have a choice whether or not to have parents. His blinkered argument is an object lesson in the relation of methodological and cultural –ideological– individualism, as obvious and unexamined as the crossover from the optimism of science to the optimism in politics.

The best short discussion of US politics I've had recently was with my second generation Polish immigrant boss. Talking about healthcare, social democracy and why Sanders is an idiot. "Scandinavia isn't politics! It's culture!" He's fully in favor all every standard social democratic policy. He'd be happy in Norway. But his father moved to the US.

Right now millions are out of work and worried about food and liberals are worried about fake news. The right wing base is screaming to open the economy. Corey Robin –Princeton and Yale– brags about teaching at CUNY, and writes about communism (and the same damn book). Buppies in the NYT say the protests are about race. Self-interest still means wanting to feel good about yourself.
New tag for Piketty

Credit where credit is due.

Pulitzer Prize for "Commentary" has gone to...
...Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer and, this year, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Solidarity (repeats)

An outraged Davis, who has fought for justice in his sister's murder for years, had trouble calming himself and had to step out of the courtroom. He later told the Boston Globe he owed Judge Casper an apology for his behavior, yet was livid at the suggestion he was an informant: "I’d take a bullet before I’d ever incriminate anyone.”

Apparently, accusations of being a tattle-tale are worse than accusations of murder.

As I said I'm seeing more and more of this shit in the US. Vanguardism into fascism,  and Slobodian is too naive and stupid to know what the fuck it means.

Final OverdriveⒶ
@FinalOverdrive
#anarchism #xenofeminism #autistic Storm the Heavens and Conquer Death. Destroy the State, Pronouns: he/him Age:31 *DATA EXPUNGED* Individualist anarchist.

"Storm the Heavens and Conquer Death." "Individualist anarchist." I had to google "xenofeminism".

Laboria Cuboniks@Xenofeminism
If nature is unjust, change nature.
laboriacuboniks @bastardi.netlaboriacuboniks.net 

LSE blog: Repurpose your Desire: Xenofeminism and Millennial Politics.
Xenofeminism. Helen Hester. Polity Press. 2018.

What if you don’t like what you want? Two takes on the politics of desire have turned heads on academic social media in early 2018. Andrea Long Chu, writing for n+1 with admirable boldness, makes the case that the gender experience of trans women like her rests not on identity but on desire. As such, Chu argues, it is not only painful and remains at best half-fulfilled – ‘your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back’ – but it is also bound to defy political ideals. In this instance, trans women’s embodiment of an originally patriarchal aesthetics of femininity clashes with radical feminist demands (whether of the 1970s or 2010s) to abolish the same. Making the point that desire generally arrives unbidden, her conclusion is that ‘nothing good comes of forcing [it] to conform to political principle’. Partially in response to Chu, Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books cautiously pursues digital culture’s sexual politics to the example of dating apps and sites. She points out how apparently innocuous ‘personal preference’ categories police romantic and sexual encounters to algorithmically reproduce the mechanisms of domination and exclusion inherent in misogyny, racism, ableism and transphobia. In the face of how technoculture cuts desire down to size, Srinivasan concludes that while there can never be an obligation to desire anyone in particular – ‘nobody wants a mercy fuck’ – there may be a ‘duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires’.

Two contrasting arguments, they are both based on the acknowledgement of quite how political the personal is; they only differ in their response. Taken together, they also figure as academic instances of what a Janus-faced millennial culture does best, and what is often misunderstood as ‘snowflake’ hypocrisy by a baby-boomer commentariat. For one, there is the remarkable new prevalence of cultural criticism as part of popular culture as such (as opposed to an earlier model of ‘applying’ critical insights to a pop culture separate to them). ‘Wokeness’, whatever its pitfalls, at the very least means that it has become cool to assess your individual social position against the hierarchical structures to which everyone is tied, and this is manifest, on- and offline, in calling out others as much as in ‘checking’ your own privilege. For all that, there is little bra-burning going on and no hair shirts in sight; instead, many reserve just what Chu demands in an interview for The Point podcast: ‘the right to desire what is bad for you’.

Instances are diverse. The ‘slutwalks’ of 2011 were an early sign of a generation of cis and trans women insisting very publicly on the right to wear high femme clothes and make-up alongside the scars of their patriarchal sexist significations. A recent edited collection by Rhian E. Jones and Eli Davies marks the mood in its title: Under My Thumb: Songs that Hate Women and the Women who Love Them.

The last made "Vogue Books of the Year 2017".

Andrea Long Chu, On Liking Women.

The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them. For years, the former desire held the latter in its mouth, like a capsule too dangerous to swallow.

On Liking... Jews, or Colored people...

because sadly the obvious is unthinkable.

"Ah, Therese!" he exclaimed one day, full of enthusiasm, "if only you knew this fantasy‘s charms, if only you could understand what one experiences from the sweet illusion of being no more than a woman! incredible inconsistency I one abhors that sex, yet one wishes to imitate it!

repeat, "slutwalks"

flickr

“It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream 
since childhood: death by a sexual maniac"

The quote is Louise Brooks' description of Lulu's end. Brooks was honest.

Liberalism turns every conflict it can't resolve into an aspect of its optimism: the pessimistic acceptance of greed became an optimistic philosophy of science and law, and now the sympathetic understanding of self-disgust has become the celebration of freedom, even the freedom to be a slave.

"In the course of the year 1838, the peaceful island of Barbados was rocked by a strange and bloody revolt. About two hundred Negroes of both sexes, all of whom had recently been emancipated by the Proclamations of March, came one morning to beg their former master, a certain Glenelg, to take them back into bondage. An Anabaptist minister, acting as spokesman for the group, read out a list of grievances which he had compiled and recorded in a notebook. Then the discussion began. But Glenelg, either from timidity or because he was scrupulous, or simply afraid of the law, refused to be swayed. At which point he was at first mildly jostled, then set upon and massacred, together with his family, by the Negroes, who that same evening repaired to their cabins, their palavers, their labors, and customary rituals. Swift action on the part of Governor MacGregor succeeded in suppressing the matter, and the emancipation pursued its course. As for the notebook of grievances it has never been recovered."

And searching for an ending, I find Robin and Leiter. Perfect.

More vanguardism/fascist kitsch, from Slobodian.

Earnest left-liberal blah blah Ryan Cooper says "This is good"

The biggest difference between Gornick’s Communists and today’s socialists, of course, is that—for better and worse—there is no Communist Party, and no world power backing it. The Communists “came from everywhere,” as Gornick puts it, not because they all had socialist parents or grew up in the radical milieu of the Jewish Lower East Side, though many did. They came from everywhere because they lived through a world-historical moment—the Depression—and the Party, itself the product of the world-historical Russian Revolution, was there waiting for them. As Belle Rothman tells Gornick, “Life came in on us, and we were bashed over the head, and we struggled to our knees and to our feet, and when we were standing there was the Communist Party.” CP membership more than tripled over the course of the 1930s, from 18,000 to over 65,000, and peaked at 85,000. 

But the CP dwindled, the Soviet Union collapsed, the unions were broken. By the time the Great Recession bashed today’s socialists over the head, there was nothing there. It has taken nearly a decade to build an organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), that comes anywhere close to approaching the CP in numbers—DSA currently has around 50,000 members—though it is not really comparable in most other senses.

pathetic, tragic, or farce. I'm not sure what to say. She didn't recognize Gornick's name. She probably wouldn't recognize Michael Harrington.

I'll never forget the Debs-Thomas dinner for Major Owens and Sam Meyers in 1987. Getting drunk with auto mechanics and secretaries, laughing in the face of idiots from the DSA, one of whom I recognized from high school. He went to Yale. He was manning the youth table. My girlfriend was on the executive committee of Meyers' Local 259. She was a secretary/assistant to the film curator at the Whitney, and the shop steward. She was a first generation college grad, but she went on for a PhD. A couple of years after she left, they voted to decertify the union.

The author, Alyssa Battistoni, on twitter: "we are truly entering a golden age of Romance content......keep an eye out for pieces by @AriBrostoff, @sophiepinkhmmm, @CoreyRobin, @micahuetricht, @dtortorici, and more I'm sure" One of the tagged replies, tagging Jodi Dean.

"Jodi Dean, the college professor as intellectual self-pitying Goth",  and Robin.

In the end it all dovetails...

Klub Kids

Le Guin on "content"

I need a tag for the hive.
---
Now I have one.

We had a lot of fun at that party, beginning with the ride in, picked up at our apartment on the South Side by another member of the executive committee, a Puerto Rican woman in her 50s in an Oldsmobile driven by a man who my girlfriend had explained was "a friend". Her husband was at home, or somewhere, but her friend was a great guy, and they both liked to drink. And she hated Victor Potamkin.

All the anti-Koch politicos were there. Rangel was there. Dinkins spoke; Harrington spoke. I remember my reaction not the words. Both were boring, Dinkins out of political tact and weakness, Harrington because he was earnest and out of his depth. The long-time UAW lawyers spoke with camaraderie and humor. The Jesuitical dissimulation of lawyers is a kind of honesty. Owens was great. Before he was a politician he was a librarian. He loved libraries and books, the public good.

Meyers was a creature from another era. He was stentorian and comic. He acknowledged with theatrical forbearance that some of his people had voted for Reagan but said they would come to regret it. He launched into a speech that he must have been giving for years, stories that everyone from the union had heard dozens of times, and which they were ready out of a similar forbearance to go through again, especially the bits timed to make the politicos and newbies blanch.  "I remember in 1945!... The first shop I was sent to organize, way out in Flatbush.  I walked in and the first man I saw was this SIX FOOT SPADE...!" He held the pause long enough to hear the uninitiated shuffle in their seats. "AND THAT MAN WAS BROTHER JOHN JOHNSON!!" A tall black man rose slowly, shaking his head, looking at the ground, smiling. He raised his head and a hand to the room and stood as Meyers continued the story. Next up was Brother Pete Papadopoulos, later the woman who'd given us a ride to the party. Last up was my girlfriend. "WE GOT ART HISTORIANS NOW!" Everyone had a story told. The romance was real but faded. The friendships were still there.

If I'm telling stories I should talk about the night at dinner in the early 70s when my father found out to his chagrin that he was a hero to the local CP. The son of an old friend was in town and staying at the party office. They had places to crash. My father called at the end of dinner and the kid on the line interrogated him: "Who are you? What do you want?" My father gave his name.  "Oh,Yes sir! Yes, Mr Edenbaum. I'll get him sir." Sitting at the table I watched my father move the phone away from his ear, incredulous.

A quicker way to make the same points I made below: Trump is about race like ISIS is about religion. I'd quibble only about the 9-11 hijackers, and their one bit of indulgence before death.

This 2 minute video by @mehdirhasan paints a more accurate picture of ISIS than 95% of bloated western thinkpieces. https://t.co/sa2OvqI9Vn

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) March 15, 2016

Corey Robin: The Definitive Take on Donald Trump
Jamelle Bouie: How Trump Happened

For Americans opposed to Trump, it’s tempting to believe that his base is a shrinking part of America; that these are the death throes of racial reaction. Eventually, goes the thinking, they’ll fade from view too.

That is wishful thinking. America is a diverse country. But it’s still a predominantly white one, where a Trumpist movement can still encompass millions of voters. And “eventually” might be a while. In the space between now and then, Trumpism—the potent mix of open prejudice, nationalist aggression, and heterodox economic policy—could thrive. In fact, it likely will, since the trends that produced Trump—a brittle economy, an ailing white working-class, an insecure white middle-class, a rising nonwhite population, political gridlock, and growing minority political power—are ongoing.

Corey Robin is still a broken record, and still an idiot. The civil rights movement was a Burkean movement of ministers and their congregants. Bouie is one of the new generation of buppie commentators, black neoliberals. Coates and Bouie replay the reactionary cynicism of Clarence Thomas to an audience of white liberals as opposed to white conservatives.
repeats and repeats and repeats

NYT: Donald Trump’s Tampa Office Is an Unlikely Melting Pot
William Grieder in the Nation: Trump can win against Clinton by running to the right and left of her.
Also, Thomas Frank, below.
---

Few outright condemnations of the protestors invading the pitch at Trump's event in Chicago.
He's being blamed.  People who whine about whiners demanding "safe spaces" aren't whining.

Leiter: "Chicago protesters chase the fascist narcissist from the city. Good for them."

Free speech means there are no government restrictions on fascist speech. It means also that people don't have "the right" to shut down an assembly of fascists, that people in Harlem don't have "the right" to chase a man walking down the street in a KKK robe, and that Jews in Skokie don't have "the right" to threaten a man in a Nazi uniform. The same rules apply to black men who wander into the "white part of town" at three in the morning and women who jog alone at night in Central Park.  All of the people above are "within their rights" in wanting to be left alone.

The calculations of real politics, as function and not ideal, practice and not theory (and of participants not philosophers), includes accounting for prudence.

People are cruel, but Trump's not the fool who's stumbled onto the wrong street, he's the asshole who's gone too far. A GOP official said the leadership see his rallies as "absolutely toxic". He's destroying the Republican party and replacing it with himself. In this country, that leads nowhere.
---
Four years later, the last sentences surprised me.

Freud wins again.
The author describes the paragraph below as "a few hundred words of complete nonsense" and calls the title "meaningless".  Against his own worst intentions (allowing for some absolute nonsense and bad grammar) much of it is comprehensible, written while drunk, with a few good passages.  The title itself makes perfect sense.

“Music, Religion, Politics, and Everyday Life: The Tensions of Utopianism and Pragmatism in Movements for Change.”

From the scribes and rabbis who wrote the original Torah, to the troubadour-activists who sang “Which Side Are You On?” and “Waste Deep in the Big Muddy,” to the gangbangers and hip-hoppers who create contemporary street rap, the relationship between culture, politics, religion and everyday life has been poorly understood. As Bloor observes: “In fact sociologists have been only too eager to limit their concern with science to its institutional framework and external factors relating to its rate of growth or direction this leaves untouched the nature of the knowledge thus created.” There is an obvious tension between romanticism and reality, between humanity and barbarism, between self-reflection and communal expression, which pervades both the written word and the oral tradition. Can a society promote utopianism and dystopianism simultaneously, while allowing its governing officials, whether military conquerors or democratically elected, to perform the necessary day-to-day functions of street-cleaning, sanitation, animal rescue, industrial production, hunting-and-gathering, maintaining law and order, and (what Heideger called the “organicity of intellectual work”) educating children and reproducing the next generation. We might call this a kind of scientism of contradiction, or the contradictions of scientific production, or the contradictory intellectual discipline of everyday life. In other words, can the rigors of so called “pure” intellectual work (including those of the priestly class and its modern counterparts), the artistry of craftwork (or the craft of artistry), and the degradations of subsistence agriculture, mining, factory work, and retail sales co-inhabit the same society without igniting the ticking time bomb of social implosion, as we've recently seen in riots in the French suburbs and in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles? How, in other words, does the globalization of both production and knowledge work (the so-called “Walmartization” of societies) challenge our ability to think clearly about what is true in contrast to what is delusion? Self-delusion and self-discipline inhibits the reflective self, the postmodern membrane, the ecclesiastical impulse forbidden by truth-seeking and sun worship, problematizing the inchoate structures of both reason and darkness, allowing knowledge, half-knowledge, and knowledgelessness to undermine and yet simultaneously overcome the self-loathing that overwhelms the Gnostic challenge facing Biblical scribes, folksingers, and hip-hop rappers alike. Sociologists ignore these topics at their peril. 

Dreier says C. Wright Mills would be ashamed.

If Mills were alive today, he’d be saddened by the exponential growth of bad writing by academics, especially by those on the left. The problem of academic jargon is not confined to a single political or ideological wing, but it certainly dominates much of the writing by leftists in the social sciences and humanities.

...I was recently asked to review a paper submitted to the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture for its upcoming annual conference at the University of Calgary in Canada. The paper was entitled “Detroit: Sense of Place and Self-Overcoming,” which I hoped would have something to do with the class and race struggles of the city’s working class, which has suffered due to the decline of its auto industry and Michigan’s increasingly right-wing and anti-union policies. Instead, here’s how the author summarized his ideas:

We build, maintain, and structure cities. Cities, however, maintain and structure certain attitudes in us. Given the attitudes generated by our sense of a place, critical perspectives that only target overt structures within city systems are incomplete. Jacobs outlines several design aspects of the city that are “Anticity…” Hardt and Negri identify the task of the politics of the metropolis as “…to organize antagonisms against hierarchies and divisions of the metropolis…” To fully engage the attitudes generated by our sense of a place requires what Nietzsche describes as self-mastery. Though important factors, design and politics alone are insufficient.

A prominent urban scholar at Harvard describes his latest research project as following:

Through a conceptual distinction between concentrated urbanization (agglomeration) and extended urbanization (operational landscapes) … we aim to investigate the historical geographies of the capitalist urban-industrial fabric in ways that supersede inherited metageographical binarisms while opening up new sociological, cartographic and political perspectives on the contemporary global-urban condition.

...Detroit and other American cities face enormous problems—poverty, homelessness, suburban sprawl, decaying infrastructure, underfunded schools, pollution, racial profiling by cops, and others. Professors and researchers who study and care about cities—and whose work is subsidized directly and indirectly (through foundation grants and government-sponsored financial aid to students) by tax dollars—have an obligation to help address these problems, in part by explaining the roots of the urban crisis and what’s needed to address it. It is difficult to see how this kind of abstract theorizing and impenetrable prose contributes to improving our cities.

The project at Harvard is the Urban Theory Lab, and the professor is Neil Brenner
Previous, on another Harvard cultural "Lab"
on the "research model"
For Detroit, see the link on the bottom here.

"The Tensions of Utopianism and Pragmatism in Movements for Change.”
My first thought was Corey Robin's contempt for Montesquieu because "he pursued no beckoning light", then Emmanuel Todd, "A religion is a form of utopia: when it disappears, alternative utopias appear." But the obvious is the "Democratic Socialist" Bernie Sanders and "Killer" Mike.
Actually my first response posted on twitter was "What next, the idiot Hofstadter?"
The next day Ross Douthat tweeted a quote from  "Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections"

In 1963 Richard Hofstadter published his landmark book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Today, Matt Lewis argues, America's inclination toward simplicity and stupidity is stronger than ever, and its greatest victim is the Republican Party. Lewis, a respected conservative columnist and frequent guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe, eviscerates the phenomenon of candidates with a "no experience required" mentality and tea party "patriots" who possess bluster but few core beliefs.

Americans, dumb and dumber. Fuck Peter Dreier, fuck C.Wright Mills, fuck Harvard (and Douthat was for Harvard before he was against it).  The questions remain. Below repeats the post mentioned above. Go there for the context
---
repeat from 2013

Technocracy is not democracy, and the knee-jerk, mirror-image, rebellion against technocracy is not a democratic movement. The decay of technocracy is something else; it produces another social order.


The bow-tied college professor, Jerry Herron, like Borges and his gauchos, idealizes a culture built from necessity. For the whites, including white DJs, in from the suburbs, the music was a discovery, but the men who invented the music have a richer more complex understanding. They were trying to preserve the humane in an inhumane world, using a language they as products of that world understood. There's a connection that runs through Herron to both Borges and Lawrence Lessig, and also Graeber and to Cody Wilson: a fundamental misunderstanding of culture. The knowing irony on all sides that connected Detroit techno and hip-hop to Kraftwerk and hip-hop to the gay clubs in the 70's is lost on followers of simple, otherworldly individualist, liberalism. Culture is conservative: it conserves.

Ideological liberals don't understand culture, seeing it as a choice rather than something constitutive of what they are. But libertarian culture like fascist and Stalinist culture could be called almost an oxymoron.
---

And Detroit also means Bowie.  Now let's talk politics.