Subscriber Community Thread (#4)

Jan 25, 2022

I have neglected to do one of these in some time, which is my bad. But with quite a few new subscribers joining after the last essay (welcome!), now is the time to get back on the straight and narrow. I’ll do these monthly in the short-term, and then soon move to biweekly.

As a reminder, these subscriber open threads are simply a place where I offer a few things that I’ve read in the past several weeks that I found particularly interesting, helpful, or amusing, and you can ask or discuss whatever you want in the comments. I’ll add some extras this time to make up for the gap. If you’ve read anything interesting yourself, please feel free to suggest it for others. I’ll try to check in periodically over the next day or two to join in.

Lastly, I’m excited to say that the first of what I hope to be many subscriber-exclusive interviews should be up later this week, featuring the always sharp Mary Harrington. So keep an eye out for that.

1. Michael Lind, “America’s Asymmetric Civil War” (Tablet)

A great piece outlining how many of the core political battles in America have now become struggles between Progressive metros and the conservative suburbs and exurbs that often surround them, with Red states overriding the laws passed by the Blue cities, which then leverage federal power to override the states, producing an endless cycle of animosity. Lind explains that: “Many of the ‘culture war issues’ that divide left and right are provoked by the metro area left’s attempt to use federal regulations to impose policies that could not be passed by the city council or the state government.”

This is made possible because:

Beginning in the 1960s, Democrats—by then having become the urban party they are today—discovered that by means of federal “grants-in-aid,” they could circumvent state legislatures and go directly to Congress. According to one estimate, in 2018 federal aid to state and local governments, taking the form of grants to specific programs in areas from K-12 education to environmental policy to transportation and infrastructure, amounted to $697 billion, doled out via 1,386 separate programs that bind localities to the federal government.
As a result of all of these targeted federal spending programs, about one-third of state spending actually comes from the federal government. This in turn means that a substantial number of state and local government employees are in effect paid by the federal government, either to administer grants or to ensure compliance with the many complicated federal regulations attached to the grants.
…
When federal grants-in-aid and corporate blackmail are understood as weapons of the downtown Democrats, the power of Republican red state legislatures to override blue city ordinances looks less impressive. While targeted grants-in-aid may benefit only a few state citizens, it is the noisy few who will fill up the phone lines to state legislators if the federal government threatens to cut them off as part of a progressive blackmail campaign. Democratic legislators have also found ways of tying more popular forms of federal aid—for transportation, housing, and schools—to more arcane priorities in cultural areas, forcing localities to choose between embracing Democratic ideas of race, gender, and sexual orientation or risk losing federal funding for schools and highways.

There’s a lot more. What I find most interesting about all this is how America seems to be quickly fracturing into increasingly independent and alienated domains. What happens once some of the state governments begin to just regularly ignore or override orders from the Imperial City? I assume this is the logical next step.

2. James McElroy, “How Marxism created the West” (UnHerd)

A very interesting article on the thought of Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) and his commentary on Marxism, including his predication that it would lead straight to, well, basically right where we are now. I’m ashamed to say I have not yet read Del Noce, but he’s near the top of my list. As McElroy explains it, he seems to have arrived at many of the same conclusions that I have been considering (just some sixty years earlier):

Del Noce’s take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. “There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction,” he wrote. Marx’s view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process — man’s liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of man’s alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Society’s values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.
Since, in the Marxist framework, removing oppression is the primary way of bringing about the future, philosophy is subordinated to politics. As Marx wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” In Marxism, reason is not something universally accessible to all; it is the tool that certain radically free people use to impose their will on existence. This creates a contradiction: how can anyone change the world if history is inevitably going to culminate in communism? And if all philosophy is just a reflection of economic arrangements, is the same not true of Marxism?
This contradiction bifurcated Marxism along two different paths. The first path embraced the revolutionary philosopher, while the other one embraced history. The first path led to Lenin, the revolution, and the Soviet Union. The second path led to us. Del Noce wrote, “Marxism has ended up being a stage in the development of the technological and affluent society, which accepts all [of Marxism’s] negations of traditional thought but at the same time eliminates its messianic and (in its own way) religious aspect.” Marx’s vision was achieved by his ostensible enemy.
Long before it became obvious, Del Noce wrote that “the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left is there for everyone to see.” He argued that liberalism “sublimated,” or absorbed, various aspects of Marxism, transforming into what he called “the technological society.” Bourgeois society always had two historical enemies: revolutionary thought and religious thought. As a synthesis of these opposites, Marxism provided bourgeois society with the tool needed to defeat both.

3. Richard Bernstein, “Where Wokism Is a Oui Bit Different” and “In Scotland, They'll Take the Woke Road” (RealClearInvestigations)

Two quite good reporting pieces (in parts 1 & 2) on the advance of “le wokisme” in Europe.

4. Ash Milton and Stephen Pimentel, “Liberal Education Is Applied History” (Palladium)

This is a phenomenal essay, which is why it’s unfortunate that the title is so dull. “Applied history” is really only a small part of the argument. Instead the core of this traces the rise and then complete degeneration of the American elite as a leadership class, and ties this degeneration to the loss of essential virtues once carefully and deliberately cultivated by that elite through what was once known as “liberal education.” For various reasons, that education of virtue, ability, and responsibility was abandoned in favor of training for technocratic managerialism. And now:

Our society’s institutions are buckling under the weight of accumulating dysfunction, and our higher education embodies the current regime’s neuroses instead of challenging them. Materially, we have the ability to shape history in ways few past generations could have imagined. But our historical consciousness is increasingly amnesic and the twin forces of learned collective helplessness and political conflict are crippling our ideas of what is possible. Whatever merits [Harvard President Charles] Eliot’s regimen of self-development might once have had, its evolved form has left our best students aimless.

They note that in past times similar to this, such as Petrarch’s or the Enlightenment era of the American Founders:

[R]eforms were only made possible by small groups that focused on their own private goals in learning and research, and cultivated intellectual cultures very different from those around them. Broader reforms only became possible once these had reached the right degree of maturity, and had found their natural bases for both students and patrons.

It was these counter-cultures that made the training of a new, replacement elite possible. The authors therefore advocate for a new Renaissance, and the formation of a new “liberal education” that incorporates modern priorities, such as STEM or the study of Chinese language and classics, in addition to older wisdom from the Western canon. I found the whole thing quite interesting, so recommend reading it in full.

5. “Common-good conservatism: a debate” (The New Criterion)

For those who may be interested in such things, New Criterion has devoted its January 2022 issue to what I found to be a fascinating collection of essays debating the pros and cons of “common-good conservatism” (sometimes also referred to as “post-liberalism” in the American context). It includes some often fiery pieces by Kim R. Holmes, R.R. Reno, Josh Hammer, Ryan T. Anderson, Daniel J. Mahoney, Robert R. Reilly, Charles R. Kesler, and James Pierson. This is basically the young conservative right in the process of revolting entirely against the Reaganite “Conservative Inc.” consensus, creating a fissure that seems to be rapidly growing. Meanwhile the establishment left seems pretty much entirely oblivious to all this, tending to reduce the right to Trump vs. Never-Trump, even though (I would say) all this is occurring in reaction to Wokeness, not Trump. So while this is unfortunately all behind a paywall, if you want a front row seat to the evolving struggle over the future of the American right you could consider subscribing for a bit to read it.

6. Brian Riedl, “How Higher Interest Rates Could Push Washington Toward a Federal Debt Crisis” (The Manhattan Institute)

Did you enjoy my review of Ray Dalio’s book on debt cycles and the rise and fall of nations? Then you may also be interested in this rather alarming report that does the math and finds that the United States has a bit of a problem. With inflation running wild, the Federal Reserve needs to raise interest rates to get it under control – but raising interest rates would increase the amount the U.S. government must pay on its national debt in the form of annual interest payments. But how much more, exactly? Answer: every 1% increase in interest rates would translate into $30 trillion in additional debt payments over the next 30 years. If interest rates increase a mere 2% over the previously expected baseline, annual interest payments on the debt would rise to the equivalent of 100% of tax revenue by 2051. But I’m sure the Fed and the Congress will manage to competently and judiciously navigate a course out of this bind, without doing anything to in any way further exacerbate it instead.

7. Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Beating the Blob” (The Cricic) and Herbalis, “The Blob: A brief introduction to British governance” (Substack)

Two pieces sent to me after my last essay, from which I learned all about the wonder of “Quangos” and how the UK is far deeper in thrall to the permanent NGO-State complex than even the United States.

8. “Ploughshares Fund 2022 Request for Proposals” (Ploughshares Fund)

Dear Reader: after learning about the out-of-control money and influence of the foundation-non-profit-government complex in “No, the Revolution Isn’t Over” or the above, do you want in on the action? Do you want a chance to receive up to $75,000 in grant money from the United States’ single largest non-profit devoted to preventing nuclear war? Think that you can prevent said nuclear annihilation – even as the U.S. and Russia inch closer to the edge – by acting decisively to “increase equity and justice in nuclear policies and institutions by empowering diverse voices,” and “cultivating inclusive spaces”? Then the Ploughshares Fund is eager to consider your grant application!

Just make sure that your proposed project…

Should fit within one or more of the following areas of focus:
Challenging racism and white supremacy in nuclear policies and institutions.
Building actionable connections between nuclear weapons issues and other issue areas (such as climate, labor, immigration) to address militarism’s influence on foreign and domestic policies, globally.
Examining and dismantling the military-industrial complex.

Please note:

People of color, disabled people, women, and those that identify as LGBTQAI+, as well as those working at organizations led by Black, Indigenous, LGBTQAI+, disabled people, and women are particularly encouraged to apply.

Do you fit these criteria, but are concerned that you have no experience whatsoever in nuclear arms control? Don’t worry, that is not required – in fact it’s really better if you don’t:

We encourage individuals working at any entity or as independent individuals who have either 1) never been a project lead on a foundation grant or 2) never led on a nuclear-specific project before, to apply.
There are no limitations on the ages, positions (including students), or job titles that may apply. Applicants do not need to be a career professional or nuclear expert to apply.
Applicants and projects may be based in the United States or internationally.

Please report back if your application is successful. Thank you in advance for saving the world!

9. “Say not the Struggle nought Availeth” (Arthur Hugh Clough, 1819–1861). Finally, for those of you who were reduced to depression and hopelessness by my last essay, I’ll leave you with a few lines of verse:

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.

The Upheaval

Subscriber Community Thread (#4)