The Time of Monsters: Recent Episodes
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Listen now (46 min) | Linda Hirshman on why the attack on women’s rights will only get worse
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Police detaining anti-war demonstration in Saint-Petersburg, Russia (Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)One strange thing about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that there wasn’t much of a propaganda push on its behalf, either at home or abroad. On February 21, days before the invasion started, Putin gave a long, tedious speech that was a partisan and dishonest history lesson, a long airing of grievances about how Russia had been wronged by various parties and Ukraine had no independent national identity. While this was a pro-war speech, it was not a rousing one: it seemed like the goal was not to incite belligerent ecstasy so much as to bludgeon the population into dutiful acceptance of the conflict’s inevitability.
Putin seems to have thought that mobilizing the population wasn’t necessary, that he would have quick military victory which would be accepted by Russians and the world as a fait accompli.
That plan has gone badly awry. Ukrainian resistance has been strong, there’s been universal condemnation (including a lopsided UN votes of of 141 countries voting for a resolution condemning the invasion, with only 5 countries rejecting the resolution and 35 abstaining). Moreover, there’s been protests against the war in dozens of Russian cities, with more than 13,000 arrests made.
In response to these changes, the Russian government has prodded its allies to release a torrent of propaganda in support of the war. These propaganda messages often excoriate the anti-war movement, which seems to be worrying Putin. I wanted to look at some examples of propaganda which offer an important window into the war. They clarify the extent to which Putin feels the need to go beyond the historical and legal argument of his original speech and make a wider pitch to the forces of traditionalism and jingoism.
First, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has come out in support of the war.
Matthew Luxmoore @mjluxmooreRussian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill unsurprisingly endorsing Putin’s narrative on Ukraine in a sermon today. According to him the West essentially organises genocide campaigns against countries that refuse to stage gay parades 🤯 March 6th 2022
3,614 Retweets7,247 LikesIn his statement, Kirill conjured up a conspiracy of the West to impose gay pride parades upon the whole world. “Pride parades are designed to demonstrate that sin is one variation of human behavior,” Kirilll said. “That's why in order to join the club of those countries, you have to have a gay pride parade.” The theocratic arguments made here aren’t always present in Putin-style nationalism. The theocrats have to be understood as a a faction of the nationalist coalition. In framing the war in homophobic terms, Kirill is trying to position his church as central to the nationalist project.
And, second, an assortment of Z Rants.
In what might to be an organic development the Latin letter Z (which doesn’t have a counterpart in the Cyrillic script alphabet) is starting to be used as an identity badge by Russian soldiers and war supports. This seemingly the last few days, there have been a host of videos featuring Russians supporting the war wearing shirts with the Z marker.
These videos themselves are the earmark of government propaganda rather than the work of individuals (they feature large crowds wearing the same outfit). In one video, a young man gives a rant:
Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock“we are not fascists! the ukrainians are the nazis! and here’s the video to prove i—ooooooh, okay. right right right right right.” March 5th 2022
1,524 Retweets5,906 Likes
The special operations [i.e. the war] by Russia in Ukraine is the consequence of the death of more than 14,000 people in Donbas, 150 of them innocent children, in others, a direct military threat to our country. Today, our army, like during WW2, is again clearing Europe of Nazism. Our mission is to help the government carry out their sacred mission and not interfere, but to support them and raise morale. At this time, in our country, people posing as innocent citizens, it shames me to say, are telling people to come to protests. The streets of Russian cites are the source of the strength of our military and we promise that we will not leave them undefended. This mission will succeed, whether you like it or not. Speaking to all our soldiers – keep working, brothers, and be assured that you are heroes to us. FOR RUSSIA! FOR THE PRESIDENT! [chanting of wider group] (Translation by Twitter user @vegadrien)
Here's another tirade along the same lines:
Kamil Galeev @kamilkazaniPutin took a decision to start this war. But he got a wide support of the Russian people. Nobody's forcing them to participate in these shows of support, they could totally skip it. But they cheer. They cheer, because they feel good, they feel proud. Russia became great again March 6th 2022
2,540 Retweets10,367 LikesIn both rants, the targets of abuse are anti-war protesters as well as Ukrainians. In the second protesters are called saboteurs, suggesting they have sinister motives. Both draw on the memory of the Second World War for inspiration (the second rant alludes to the siege of Leningrad), evoking both the need for national unity and the allegedly fascistic nature of the enemy. The Great Patriotic War, of course, was formative to Soviet nationalism and remains a potent inspiration in Russia.
These videos are strongly authoritarian and carry the threat of violence. They are goonish propaganda. They suggest that anti-war protesters could soon face not just arrest but also violence at the hands of counter-protesters. Stirring up this sort of domestic political violence might not have been Putin’s intentions from the start, but by invading Ukraine he’s opened up Pandora’s box. All sorts of monsters are now flying out.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler; translation assistance by Robin Ganev)
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Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Putin (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)At the end of January, David Klion and I talked about Russia’s pending attack on Ukraine. I think much in our discussion still holds up, particularly our discussion of the importance of the 1990s in shaping Vladimir Putin’s sense of national humiliation, the fact the moral onus of the current war being on Putin, and the extremely limited range of options open to Joe Biden and NATO.
The war that was once hypothetical is now a reality. So David and I sat down again to assess where things stand. We take up in particular the suffering experienced in Ukraine, the plight of the Russian people, the Russian anti-war movement, the folly of those calling for a no fly zone or generally ignoring the dangers of nuclear war, and the importance of Russian oligarchs as pillars of Putin’s regime.
On the subject of oligarch’s David has written a superb piece for Jewish Currents about Roman Abramovich, a billionaire supporter of Putin who has extensive financial ties to the west. As David makes clear in his article, and as we discuss on the podcast, the so-called Russian oligarchs are not just a Russian phenomenon. They have extensive ties to business and political elites in many countries. That fact they have been indulged for so long, despite enabling Putin and looting Russia, suggests a much broader culpability for the current crisis and the need for a much more radical reckoning.
We also discussed, more briefly, David’s profile of Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia and twitter personality. That’s a topic we’ll return to in a future episode.
In addition to the earlier talk with David, this one can be enriched by listening to my discussion with Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders.
I should note that occasionally on the podcast you’ll hear my daughters in the background. Alas, the only convenient time David and I had to talk was on a weekend. I don’t think the background noise is too bothersome.
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George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin (Photo by Brooks Kraft/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)The prospect of war raises the stakes and heightens the intensity of political disagreement. But the outbreak of war often has the reverse effect, with pressures for national unity narrowing the spectrum of debate. In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, arguments within the Republican Party were particularly intense, leading analysts like Amber Phillips of The Washington Post to write about “a huge split among Republicans on how to characterize what’s happening.”
As the conflict progressed, this huge split has been papered over. Voices, notably Tucker Carlson of Fox News, that were previously loudly warning against American involvement in the conflict have become more subdued, hewing closer to the Republican Party line condemning the invasion and criticizing Joe Biden for alleged weakness.
This progression can be seen most clearly in the most famous Republican, Donald Trump, who has never been shy about praising Vladimir Putin. On February 22, in an interview on the The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, the former president celebrated Putin’s strategy of recognizing as sovereign republics the breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. This was, he said, “genius.” Trump chortled, “I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border.” But just four days later, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Trump shifted his tack, calling the invasion “an atrocity that should have never been allowed to occur.” He did continue to insist that Putin was “smart,” in contrast to American leaders who were “dumb.”
Yet, even if Trump has toned down his words about Putin, this shift isn’t likely to last long. While passions about the war may cool in the coming weeks and months, the divisions that existed before the invasion of Ukraine are likely to resurface since they are a product of fundamental ideological differences.
In a Washington Post column, Amber Phillips provided a useful taxonomy of three primary types: the Hawks, the Putin Sympathizers, and the “Why Should We care?” Contingent. (For the sake of clarity, I’ve shifted the order of her listing.) To this list one could note there is a fourth ideological type that existed in the past but now is notably missing: the Republican Realists.
The Hawks are the most familiar of the four types. These are the unreconstructed Cold Warriors, the people who never trusted the Russkies and perhaps thought glasnost and perestroika were fake. Some of them still tend to refer to Russia as the Soviet Union. Mitt Romney is the emblematic figure here. The Hawks want a strict hard-line policy of containing and isolating Russia. They want NATO to act as the guard dog that makes sure Russia doesn’t dare cast a shadow outside its own borders.
The Putin Sympathizers are the traditionalist authoritarians who have come into prominence in the Trump era. They see Putin as a bulwark against global liberalism, someone who upholds gender norms and Christian values. Although often associated with Trump, this tradition can be seen earlier in Pat Buchanan.
The “Why Should We Care?” Contingent are the heirs of the older Robert Taft Republican isolationists. They insist that America needs to look after its domestic concerns first and foremost and avoid being drawn into foreign quarrels. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley gave voice to these sentiments by saying, “Sending new troops, expanding the security commitment and expanding NATO—I just think that’s a strategic mistake.” In terms of policy, this group aligns with the Putin Sympathizers.
The Republican Realists are the missing voices in the debate. These are national security types who prioritized advancing American business interests, which often meant making deals with hostile powers and finding a way to accommodate international differences. This is the tradition of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Unlike the Hawks, this group both understands and values diplomacy—especially when dealing with peer rivals like Russia and China. Unlike the Putin Sympathizers or the ”Why Should We Care?” Contingent, the Republican Realists were not unilateralists. They valued international agreements and building alliances.
The Republican Realists were once a force in American politics but they’ve been successively elbowed out by the hawks and the unilateralists. Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel were perhaps the last major figures in this tradition. They ended their political careers as marginal figures in the GOP, more at home with Barack Obama than their fellow Republicans.
If the current Ukraine crisis recedes, we’re likely to see a renewed debate among the Hawks, the Putin Sympathizers and the “Why Should We Care?” Contingent. Yet all of them offer unsatisfactory solutions. They are either too militaristic or too unilateralist. The disappearance of Republican Realists means that we’re not likely to get a shrewd and prudential Republican foreign policy alternative. Which is too bad, since in a two-party system that’s something that is desperately needed.
UpcomingI’ll have more on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shortly in the form of an extensive podcast with David Klion, who wrote this fine article.
(This is an expanded version of a piece that ran in The Nation)
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One of Canada’s most embarrassing exports, Gavin McInnes (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)Canadian political leaders are blaming America for the Freedom Convoy, a group of anti-government protestors using trucks to paralyze the nation’s capital and temporarily close down the crucial trucking lane in the Windsor/Detroit Border. On February 11, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described his conversation with Joe Biden earlier that day. “We discussed the American, and indeed global influences on the protest,” Trudeau said. “We talked about the U.S.-based flooding of the 911 phone lines in Ottawa, the presence of U.S. citizens in the blockades, and the impact of foreign money to fund this illegal activity.”
Earlier that week Jagmeet Singh, leader of the left-leaning New Democratic Party which often supports Trudeau’s Liberal Party in parliamentary votes, said, “It is clear that this is not a protest; this is an act to try to overthrow the government, and it is getting funded by foreign interference and we need to investigate and stop that – stop the flow of that foreign interference, particularly coming from the [United] States.”
Politicians often blame protests on outside agitators, a tried and true scapegoating tactic used to deflect attention from internal problems. Yet these “Blame America” arguments have a smidgen of truth to them.
Americans have offered tremendous boosts to the Freedom Convoy in both media and money. At a rally in Texas in late January, former president Donald Trump hailed “those great Canadian truckers.” Fox News hosts have repeatedly cheered on the Freedom Convoy, with Tucker Carlson enthusing about it being copied in the United States. Just as Che Guevara hailed the prospect of “one, two, many Vietnams” so Carlson seems to dream of “one, two, many convoys.” Copycat protests are being discussed in the USA, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. A hacked Facebook account in Missouri turned out to be one of the most vocal and far reaching advocates for the protest on social media.
Leaked donor data from the Christian crowd funding site GiveSendGo simultaneously substantiates and complicates the narrative of American intervention. In two separate campaigns, the Freedom Convoy raised a total of US$9.6 million from 104,180 donors. Fifty-nine percent of those donors (over 60,000) were from the United States, 39 percent from Canada and the remainder from elsewhere. The biggest donations, $90,000, is alleged to have come from the California billionaire Thomas Siebel. (All the identifying data points to Siebel although he hasn’t confirmed it.) More broadly, a Washington Post investigation of the ZIP codes of the donors makes clear that the financial support largely is from well-to-do right-leaning communities. As the paper reports, “the richer an American community was, the more likely residents there were to donate, and the biggest number of contributions often came from communities where registered Republicans made up solid majorities.”
So: Blame America? Is the USA exporting its loopy political disorder north? Not so fast. The data also shows that Canadians donated more per individual. A little over 50 percent of the total amount (to the tune of $4.8 million) came from Canadian supporters.
More to the point, the organizing of the Freedom Convoy makes clear this is for the most part a Made-in-Canada operation. Lead organizers are long standing members of the Canadian far right, involved in previous protests supporting white nationalism and opposing labor unions and climate change action.
As Emily Leedham noted in Jacobin:
Freedom Convoy organizer and Canada Unity founder James Bauder’s allegiances are to the far right…. Two years ago, Bauder participated in another convoy called United We Roll which had connections to far right elements in Canada’s Yellow Vests movement and other white nationalist hate groups.…In addition to Bauder, other Freedom Convoy organizers, such as Pat King, Tamara Lich, and BJ Lichter, have a history of associating with hate groups and expressing racist and anti-immigrant sentiments.
Instead of blaming America, it’s better to think in terms of transnational right-wing ideological networks. The Canadian/American border has largely always been porous for white people. Just Canadian actors, like Jim Carrey and William Shatner, or singers like Celine Dion and Joni Mitchell find fame south of the border, so prominent Canadian-born reactionaries ideologues like Father Charles Coughlin and Mark Steyn (a notorious Islamophobe) have often found America an ample market for their wares. Conversely, the ideas of the 1920s Klan caught on like fire in the cold of Canada, with northern franchises of hooded bigotry finding a ready audience.
But if Canadian migrants who seek riches by heading south are an old story, it’s become much more pervasive in the age of NAFTA, with the traffic now flowing in both directions. Under NAFTA, cars are transnational. Your car could have parts made in Ontario, Michigan, or Veracruz. Our ideologies are the same way. The anti-globalists are mixing and matching ideas from Paris, Budapest, Rio, Claremont, Calgary and many other spots. Canada, by virtue of being bilingual and multicultural, is an important node in this global network. The Freedom Convoy was a test case for the network, one that succeeded and will be widely copied.
Coupled with the advent of social media, globalism has produced a transnational right that loves to complain about “globalists” and the need for stronger borders while also happily circulating memes and money (usually in USD).
Two emblematic figures of this new era are erstwhile Trump consigliere Steve Bannon and Canadian Gavin McInnis, estranged father of the Proud Boys. Although the avatar of America First thinking, Bannon has been eager to knit together an international alliance that unites nationalists and populists across the globe, a ragtag entente that ranges from Donald Trump to Victor Orbán to Jair Bolsonaro to Marine Le Pen to Nigel Farage, among many others. The transnational right l might seem like a hodgepodge until one considers the common enemy of liberalism and cosmopolitanism that unifies xenophobes, homophobes and anti-feminists.
Websites like Breitbart or Canada’s Rebel News provide a clearing house for this movement, so that news of a migrant caravan, a new vaccine mandate, or a trans athlete joining a sporting campaign can easily spark global outrage without regard for where it takes place. The far right runs on anger and the global meme sharing network supplies steady fuel.
Gavin McInnes is a perfect example of the transnational right: born in England in 1970, raised in Ottawa, he first made his mark in 1996 in Montreal as a co-founder of Vice, which pioneered the kidding-not-kidding racist humor that became the hallmark of the alt-right. He moved to the United States in the late 1990s. In 2016 he founded the Proud Boys, a clubhouse for aggressive, aggrieved bigots. McInnes disavowed his connection with the Proud Boys in 2018, although it clearly bears the marks of his ideology. Proud Boys participated in the January 6 attack on the USA capitol. In 2021, The Proud Boys were named a “terrorist entity” by the government of Canada, and the Canadian chapter has supposedly dissolved. Proud Boy members are currently talking about organizing a People’s Convoy to travel to Washington, DC.
But if the far right is transnational, so is opposition to it. The seige of Ottawa is already offering lessons to U.S. Capitol police on how to prevent trucks being used a weapon bully a city. Counter-protesters in Ottawa were effective in blunting the siege when the police were still flummoxed or complicit. Anti-fascists around the world can draw both inspiration and instruction from the mobilization of the hostility large democratic majorities everywhere have towards the hard right.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Civilian volunteers in Kyiv (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)On Thursday night, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I thought his short speech eloquently hit on some key points: the diplomatic attempts to address Russia’s security concerns, the stranglehold plutocrats have over Russia’s economy, the need for targeted sanctions, and the urgency of humanitarian relief.
Bernie Sanders @SenSandersPutin and his oligarch friends seek a divided world and the destruction of democracy. We must stand with the Ukrainian people against this war, and with the Russian people who are demonstrating against their corrupt, reckless president who started it. February 25th 2022
8,290 Retweets36,334 LikesSanders’ speech was clarifying. It offered a smart, ethically grounded approach to the conflict. To get more policy suggestions along this line, I thought it might be useful to talk to Matt Duss, Sanders’ senior foreign policy advisor. I’ve known Matt in a variety of social contexts over the years and have long regarded him as one of America’s most thoughtful foreign policy analysts. We talked about both positive steps outside countries could take as well as some of the dangerous ideas being promoted that could risk a wider war.
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. Ottawa Freedom Convoy protests (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)The Freedom Convoy had the unusual side effect of making Canada a hot topic in the New York Times for several weeks. Among the many pieces on the protests, the essays by Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg are worth signaling out. Both tried to provide empathetic portraits of the protesters, each of which downplayed the explicitly seditionist and bigoted ideology of the organizers and highlighted more inchoate social and economic anxieties.
Douthat in particular used the protest as a springboard for a novel class analysis:
To quote the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, the trucker protests have sharpened a division between “Virtuals” and “Practicals” — meaning the people whose professional lives are lived increasingly in the realm of the “digital and the abstract,” and the people who work in the “mundane physical reality” upon which the virtual society still depends.
This division is not always one of money: Plenty of Practicals do very well for themselves while plenty of Virtuals scrape along on, say, graduate-student stipends or middling think-tank salaries. But the class divide between the two categories is clear, and so is the gap between their respective influence over the central nodes of Western power.
Frequent guest Doug Bell and I decided to look at the Times coverage of the Freedom Convoy and the larger meaning of the event. What did the paper get right and where were they off base? Do centrist institutions and media understand the nature of the far right? What is missing from the conversation and what issues are being ignored?
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)The Russian invasion of Ukraine has resurfaced American right-wing Russophilia, a longstanding phenomenon that became most visible to the broader public during the Trump presidency.
This week, in an interview on the The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, Trump enthused over Putin’s strategy of recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, two regions of southeastern Ukraine, as newly sovereign republics as “genius.” The former president went on, “ I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border. That's the strongest peace force I've ever seen,” Trump said. “Here's a guy who's very savvy... I know him very well. Very, very well.”
On his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson compared Putin favorably to the American left. Carlson told his audience, “It may be worth asking yourself… why do I hate Putin... Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” These views have been echoed in many forms on the hard right, although the dominant strain of the Republican party still holds to the bipartisan consensus against Russian expansion. Of course, GOP sensibility doesn’t prevent right-wing media personality Candace Owensfrom blaming NATO and… Justin Trudeau.
Candace Owens @RealCandaceOI suggest every American who wants to know what’s actually going on in Russia and Ukraine, read this transcript of Putin’s address. As I’ve said for month— NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault. Kalpana Khurana 🙂 @khumbakaran
@Cernovich The official transcript of Putin's speech in the UN Security Council
https://t.co/wasv85VZR3February 22nd 2022
3,589 Retweets12,161 LikesCandace Owens @RealCandaceOSTOP talking about Russia. Send American troops to Canada to deal with the tyrannical reign of Justin Trudeau Castro.
He has fundamentally declared himself dictator and is waging war on innocent Canadian protesters and those who have supported them financially.February 19th 2022
20,195 Retweets78,970 LikesWhat are we to make of this alignment with Russian nationalism? It’s important to understand that it is not just a product of the Trump era, or even the Cold War. Liberal theories of Trump as “Putin’s puppet” (to use Hillary Clinton’s words) are simplistic and personalize a much deeper affinity, one that has nothing to do with personal enrichment or blackmail but is rooted in racist views of global politics.
There are two important strands of right-wing Russophilia. They often overlap, but are distinct and can occasionally be in tension. One is the belief that Russia is a necessary bulwark against liberalism. The other view is that Russia is a necessary ally in global white supremacy, pitting white nations against the non-white world (often imagined as being led by China).
Anti-Liberalism
Prior to the communist revolution in 1917, Russia typically played a reactionary role in European and global politics. It was the regime least touched by the Enlightenment, the one that bolstered monarchists and theocrats. The Russian Revolution changed that, but even in the communist period there were a few scattered voices who thought Russia could return to its old role as the bulwark of anti-liberalism.
The American fascist agitator Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960) was a key figure in the right’s shift on Russia. A murky figure, Yockey spent much of life travelling through covert neo-Nazi international networks under a variety of passports and aliases. In 1960, airport authorities opened up a lost suitcase in Fort Worth, Texas. Inside they found seven birth certificates and four passports, carrying a variety of names but all seemingly used by the same person. This led to a nation-wide FBI manhunt, with Yockey eventually arrested in Oakland, California.
Francis Parker Yockey (From The Free Dictionary)In the late 1940s, Yockey took note of the fact that Stalin, then on the verge of death and increasingly paranoid, was reviving antisemitism as a way of consolidating nationalist support. His belief in Russia’s transformation only intensified in the early 1950s, the highly paranoid era of the doctor’s plot conspiracy and Czechoslovakia’s Slánský trial in Prague, where 11 Jewish communists were convicted of treason and executed in a rank display of antisemitism. Yockey took the Prague event as an auger that the Soviet block had in practice already abandoned Marxism and was ready to revert to its traditional role as guardian of the old order. Yockey’s new interest in Russia was coupled with increasing disenchantment with the United States, which he saw as decadent society dominated by liberals and Jews.
As Matthew Rose notes in his fascinating new book A World After Liberalism, Yockey’s work “marked the beginning of a rethinking about Russia on the radical right whose distant echoes are being heard today.” In a 2018 article in The Daily Beast, Mark Potok pointed out, “in 1948, an American ideologue named Francis Parker Yockey promoting pan-European fascism that saw the Soviet Union as less of a threat to Europe than the United States was. By the late 1950s, Yockey was suggesting the USSR could help ‘free’ Europe from U.S. domination.”
What distinguishes this anti-liberal worldview from the overlapping perspective of global white supremacy is the priority given to anti-Americanism which opens the door for alliances with non-white nations if they stand up to the United States.
After his jailhouse suicide, Yockey’s estate was taken over by the antisemitic agitator Willis Carto, who shaped a myth of Yockey as a heroic fascist martyr. Yockey’s work enjoyed an underground reputation for many decades, but after the collapse of communism, there has been a revival of his ideas on Russia as a spring root for non-liberal and anti-liberal values. These arguments are no longer confined to the fascist right but also show up among more mainstream right-wingers.
In a 1990 issue of Policy Review, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, argued, “We must also be open to importing from Central Europe and Russia elements of Western culture that have survived better there than here.“
In 2013, Pat Buchanan spelled out the logic of this position in an article that asked, “Is Putin One of Us?” Buchanan’s answer was an enthusiastic yes.
Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?
In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?
[...]President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire “the focus of evil in the modern world.” President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century.
Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.
[...]
While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm.
As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.
If you believe that liberalism is an existential threat, as many conservatives do, then it’s easy to see Putin as not just a lesser evil but also a potential ally.
Global White Supremacy
Yockey-style Russophilia is predicated on a war between liberalism and the right. As we’ve seen, in Yockey’s original formulation, it had a racial dimension of equating liberalism with Jewishness. But there’s another Russophilia that sees Russia as a potential ally in a wider conflict of global race war between whites and people of color.
In his 1970 book The Passing of the Modern Age, the traditionalist historian John Lukacs claimed,
the world is breaking up into vast racial regions; the various races are beginning to be sovereign within their own regions, somewhat like the nationalities of Europe that began to form themselves into national states toward the end of the Middle Ages. Except for the Americas and Australia, the white race has returned to Europe; Africa belongs to Africans, Asia more and more to Asians. There remains the huge question of Russia's empire in Northern Asia: at the end of the last century Bismarck was supposed to have said that the most important fact in the twentieth century would be that Americans speak English; it is not impossible that the most important condition of the next hundred years might be that the Russians are, after all, white.
Lukacs was writing in a speculative vein. The line of thinking Lukacs identified was taken up by the right-wing science-fiction writers Jerry Pournelle (an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini) and Larry Niven in their series of CoDominium novels, which started in 1973. The series was premised on the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States would in the future form an alliance to stave off the threat of the non-white world.
What were once fantastical extrapolations in the hands of sci-fi novelists is now a more serious premise on the hard right. Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have repeatedly argued one reason to cultivate friendship with Russia is that it will be a necessary partner in the struggle against China.
The two arguments for Russophilia (anti-liberalism and global racism) often enough work together, but they could also be in tension depending upon which salience has priority. Bannon is an example of how the two strands can work together. He’s pumped up Russia as a potential ally against China but also admires Putin for not being woke:
Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla‘Putin ain’t woke. He is anti-woke’
‘The Russians know which bathroom to use.’
‘They know how many genders there are’
February 24th 2022
171 Retweets482 LikesBut Bannon’s desire for a crusade against China isn’t universally shared. The right is divided on China. Among some quadrants of the far right, it’s possible to see signs of some sympathy for China as well.
David Beattie J. Beattie, a former Trump advisor, tweeted:
Darren J. Beattie 🌐 @DarrenJBeattieEither Russia or China needs to set up a giant server farm for the purpose of hosting Americans who want to be able to criticize their corrupt government
Would be huge move, game changer
Think outside the boxJanuary 11th 2021
89 Retweets477 LikesRichard Hanania of The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, is sympathetic to China and Russia:
Richard Hanania @RichardHananiaChina: "Sanctions have never been a fundamentally effective way to solve problems.”
This is true. A China-led world order would be a more humane one. People who think otherwise are brainwashed by American media to know about China’s crimes but not US ones nbcnews.com/news/world/liv…February 23rd 2022
37 Retweets242 LikesWith Hanania and Beattie, we see that Russophilia is compatible with Sinophilia. The underlying logic of these ideological twists and turns is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As long as the far right defines liberalism as its enemy, it will find stranger and stranger friends.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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J.D. Vance: avatar of the white working class or plutocratic puppet (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)Until very recently, J.D. Vance was the toast of the town, at least among centrist liberals and centrist conservatives. In 2016, his book Hillbilly Elegy was hailed both as an eye-opening portrait of the white working class and as an explanation for Donald Trump’s rise. Vance’s politics were those of a Never Trump conservative who could offer a deeper understanding into the new right wing populism. In doing so, he seemed to be offering a path forward that would allow Trumpism to be rejected.
But now Vance has undergone a seeming transformation. Running for the Republican senatorial nomination in Ohio, he’s cast himself as pure Trumpist.
Writing in The Bulwark, Mona Charen expressed the displease felt by Never Trump conservatives and shared by many centrist liberals:
Vance is an extremely bright and insightful man who could have been a fresh voice for a fundamentally conservative view of the world.
But a funny thing happened after the introduction of J.D. Vance, anti-Trump voice of the working class. He began to drift into the Trump camp. I don’t know why or how, but Vance became not a voice for the voiceless but an echo of the loudmouth. Scroll through his Twitter feed and you will find retweets of Tucker Carlson, alarmist alerts about immigration, links to Vance’s appearances on the podcasts of Seb Gorka, Dinesh D’Souza, and the like, and even retweets of Mike Cernovich. On February 16, he tweeted “I still can’t believe the 45th president of the United States has no access to social media, and the left—alleged opponents of corporate power—is just totally fine with it.”
Has Vance really gone through a radical transformation? Or were the seeds of his current radicalism already there in the start?
Sarah Jones of New York magazine has long been a Vance skeptic, writing in The New Republic a rare critical review of Hillbilly Elegy. Her more recent writings on Vance have been no less scathing. I’ve long appreciated Sarah’s insights into Vance and politics in general, so I took the opportunity to ask what she thinks about the evolution of his career. In our discussion Sarah & I touch on this interesting Washington Post profile of Vance by Simon van Zuylen-Wood.
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Protest signs in Canada (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)In her New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg has written a very nuanced and searching analysis of the Freedom Convoy and the siege of Ottawa. She profiles some of the people she met at the protest. They come across not as far right ideologues but as lost souls who became unmoored during the pandemic and have latched on to protest as a way of gaining agency during a painful time. The opening paragraph makes this point memorably:
When I asked Matthew Wall, a 36-year-old electrician from Manitoba, what brought him to this city, which has been overwhelmed by a giant protest encampment, he answered with one word: “Mushrooms.” Searching for his purpose in life, he said, he went on a psychedelic spiritual journey and had an image of the Freedom Convoy, a demonstration against Covid rules that has converged on the Canadian capital with trucks and other large vehicles.
In the second half of the article, Goldberg dives into the sinister reality of the leadership of the movement: racist, far-right activists who are openly courting violence and sedition.
Although she doesn’t use these words, Goldberg is trying to see the Convoy dialectically: there’s a far right activist core that can fairly be described as protofascist which has found a recruiting and radicalizing tool in the widespread discontent with the way governments are handling the pandemic.
Some liberal commentators are now criticizing Goldberg’s column for, they say, whitewashing the convoy. On Twitter, the journalist Lindsay Beyerstein contested my claim that Goldberg’s article helped explain the attraction of the Freedom Convoy movement. “Credulously platforming people based purely on their personal insistence that they aren't fascists, despite their enthusiastic participation in a fascist street action, is not a responsible way to go about that,” Beyerstein argued. “Got through interview without dropping racial slur. Check! Gave me a hug: Check! Clearly this person deserves to be the main focus of my report. No credibility issues here.”
I think the question of the appeal of the Freedom Convoy is a crucial one. In The Toronto Star, Frank Graves, a pollster with EKOS Research, has noted that while most Canadians have a negative view of the Freedom Convoy a sizable minority (roughly 33%) are sympathetic. It’s very dangerous for 30% of the population to be sympathetic to a protest movement led by the far right.
Graves demographic analysis of the social base of these Freedom Convoy sympathizers is worth quoting:
The most important driver is generational. Half of under-50 Canadians are sympathetic to the protests and their cause. Other key drivers include education, with college graduates more sympathetic and university graduates more opposed. Social class is also a key factor with working class drawn to the protesters and middle and upper classes opposed.
Moreover, it may be that economic anxieties are driving these protests as much as the named issues of vaccines and mask mandates. Those most adamantly opposed to masks and mandates have (by far) the bleakest economic outlook, resulting in a generational resentment toward an economy that has seen younger Canada faring much worse than their parents or grandparents at a similar stage of life cycle. Wage stagnation exacerbated by inflation and affordability is a key force expressing itself in housing and many other pocketbook issues.
Nation-wide, stress has been well above normal levels for more than two years. Stress is much higher in poor people and declines with upward movement in self-defined social class. Under-50 Canada is experiencing much more stress than over-50 Canada. There is also a striking interaction between age and gender with under 35-women registering 25 per cent higher levels of stress than comparably aged males.
Most alarming, 65 per cent of Canadians believe — and have believed for more than a decade — that if the present trend in the concentration of wealth at the very top continues, Canadians may well see “violent class conflict.”
In other words, class polarization and economic stress are making Canadians more receptive to extremist right wing politics. It doesn’t do to simply say the protestors and their sympathizers are bad people or in a minority.
I think we should be clear-eyed about what's happening: a far-right movement (with a definite fascist component) is hijacking wider public discontent and they're likely to continue doing that thanks to the flat-footed response of the powers that be. Unless there's an alternative politics offered, the Freedom Convoy is going to continue to have a terrific opportunity to recruit and radicalize.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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(Photo by Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images)Over the last few weeks, both Whoopi Goldberg and Joe Rogan have gotten in trouble for ill-considered remarks. In Goldberg’s case, the controversy centered on her comment on The View that the Holocaust was not “about racism.” Rogan has a wider array of offenses, ranging from elevating anti-vaccination views to using the n-word repeatedly (on at least 70 episodes of his podcast) and regularly making other racist, sexist and transphobic comments.
Rather than rehearse the familiar free speech controversies that are tiresomely trotted forward in response to the criticisms leveled against Goldberg and Rogan, frequent podcast guest Doug Bell and I thought it would be more productive to inquire as to what social function these pundits serve.
In this episode, we discuss how shows like The View and The Joe Rogan Experience are selling a sense of friendship: we get to listen in to lively personalities who may often be glib or uniformed but seem quirky and authentic, quick with quips, sassiness and attitude. These shows belong to something we can call the Glibness Industry. Criticizing Goldberg and Rogan goes only so far. It’s the Glibness Industry that needs to be understood and challenged.
In the podcast, we mention two excellent pieces on the Goldberg affair. Adam Serwer writing in The Atlantic and Jamelle Bouie writing in The New York Times.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Protesters in Ottawa (Photo by Amru Salahuddien/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)The “Freedom Convoy” story remains in flux. Here are three points to keep in mind as the situation continues to unfold.
A policing failure.
At least in Ottawa (where the city’s downtown has been paralyzed for more than two weeks) and Windsor (where the trucking lane of the Ambassador Bridge was blocked for nearly a week), we’re looking at one of the biggest policing failures in recent Canadian history. In other municipalities, notably Vancouver and Toronto, the police were more proactive and able to blunt attempts to disrupt downtown life. Speaking on the CBC radio program The Current, former Minister of Health Allan Rock claimed the Ottawa police was “massively outnumbered.” This isn’t a plausible claim since the protest was small in number (a generous estimate would be a few hundred vehicles and 5,000 protesters). This shouldn’t have been enough to paralyze a city with 1,500 police officers and the ability to call on provincial and federal help.
Counter-protesting and Citizen activism.
As journalist Nora Loreto and I have emphasized in our two podcast conversations, one viable way to challenge the convoy’s program is counter-protesting. Some of that is starting to spring into action. On Sunday, a remarkable counter-protest organized at the spur of the moment gathered at the intersection of Riverside Drive in Ottawa and stop 25 downtown bound cars and trucks. Despite opposition from the police and criticism from the mayor, this counter-protest, which drew in hundreds of citizens, was a much more effective response than anything the police could muster. The same story played out in Kingston, Ontario earlier that weekend, with convoy supporters trying to enter the city and being blockaded by counter-protesters. The key point is that the “Freedom Convoy” is a political problem requiring a political response (like counter-protesting), more than just a police or military response. Of course, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declaring a state of emergency, we’re likely to get a police and military response soon.
Follow the Money.
Thanks to a hack of GiveSendGo, we have a better idea of where the funding of the Freedom Convoy is coming from. This information challenges the comforting idea spread by some Canadian politicians that this is just a foreign intervention in Canadian affairs. It’s true that 55% of donor are from the United States, with 39% from Canada and 6% from other nations. But Canadians donated more, so 51% of funding (about $4.3 million) comes from Canadians as against 43% (or $3.6 million) from Americans. In other words, this is very much a Canadian-based movement juiced by support from the transnational far right. That support is not just financial but also media cheerleading and social media elevation. It's crucial to see this a Canadian manifestation of a global phenomenon rather than an American intervention in Canadian affairs.
Jon Woodward @ctv_jonWho is funding the #FreedomConvoy?
If the leak of @FreedomConvoy donations data from @GiveSendGo is accurate....
The majority of donors to the #FreedomConvoy -- 55% -- are American, which is more than the number of Canadian donors -- 39%. February 14th 2022
871 Retweets1,188 LikesJon Woodward @ctv_jonCanadians make up 6 of the top 10 donors; Americans make up 3.
Canadians appear to be giving more, which is why you see the 51 per cent -- about $4.3 million -- coming from Canada.
About $3.6 million -- or 43 per cent -- comes from American addresses. February 14th 2022
125 Retweets239 Likes(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Scene from “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa, February 11, 2022. (Photo by Amru Salahuddien/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)The so-called “Freedom Convoy” continues to disrupt Canada, with Ottawa, the nation’s capital, immobilized by a siege. The anti-vaccine mandate protests have spread to include a blockade of the truck lane of the Ambassador Bridge separating Windsor and Detroit, the very heart of transnational trade between Canada and the United States.
The convoy is now the most successful far right mobilization in Canada in a generation, an earthquake in our politics. This is all the more impressive since, viewed numerically the group protesting is small. Journalists have estimated that only a few hundred trucks are involved. The protests are garnering international attention, with many groups hoping to emulate it. On his Fox News show on Monday, Tucker Carlson asked, “How long before protests like this come here?”
The protests have a complicated relation to the global far right. On the one hand, the organizers and most of the protesters are Canadians, often with longstanding ties to Canadian far right groups. But the convoy has also tapped into a global network that has provided crucial media and financial support. Grid has done excellent reporting tracing prominent Facebook pages promoting the convoy to the United States and Bangladesh, as well as funding coming from international sources. (This is a still developing story, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford declaring a state of emergency today.)
To discuss both the Canadian and international elements of the story I was very pleased to invite Nora Loreto back onto the podcast. A freelance reporter who is doing some of the best analysis of the impact of the pandemic on Canada, Nora’s work can be found on her substack newsletter and on the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics.
Further Listening
Nora and I first discussed the “Freedom Convoy” on January 31. My conversation with Martin Lukacs about the global far right’s fascination with Victor Orbán is also relevant.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly and Emmanuel Letouze talking about the Charlie Hebdo scandal in 2015 (Photo by Rob Kim/WireImage)When the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman first started reading comic books in the early 1950s they were the subject of intense controversy. At the time, comics were the intense focus of an international moral panic, accused of contributing to juvenile delinquency and illiteracy by psychologists, politicians, and parents. The repression of comics in the 1950s —which came complete with book burnings as well as more subtle forms of censorship—planted the seedbeds for the underground comics of the 1960s, where artists like R. Crumb, Shary Flenniken, and Spiegelman creating transgressive sexual and psychedelic art. This in turn led to Spiegelman’s pathbreaking graphic novel Maus, an attempt to tell, in the visual language of comics, the type of story typically thought as too mature and difficult for the form.
Still from Comic Book Confidential (Photo by Cinecom Pictures/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)With the removal of Maus from a school curriculum in Tennessee, history seems to be coming full circle. The removal is part of a larger wave of graphic novels being challenged in schools and libraries, often dealing with LGBTQ themes and stories.
I thought it would be an opportune time to look at why comics are such an inherently scandalous form. So I sat down and had a wide-ranging conversation with Charles Hatfield, one of the best comics scholars in the world and author of Alternative Comics (2005) and other scholarly work.
We took up the history of censoring comics, why visual media provokes, the gatekeeping of children’s reading material, the rise of underground comics, the elevation of comics in the pages of RAW (the magazine edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly), the ethics of telling stories about atrocities, and the way Spiegelman used formalistic experiments to construct a Holocaust narrative that is tactful and discreet while also being honest. Some of the ground we cover overlaps with the biography of Mouly I wrote, In Love With Art.
Controversial scene from Prisoner of the Hell Planet, a part of MausAnother controversial scene from Prisoner of the Hell PlanetI was very happy to get a chance to go over this territory again, and Charles and I delve further into its continued relevance.
More Comics PodcastsFor more comics discussion, previous podcasts have dealt with Jack Kirby’s The Eternals and the politics of Steve Ditko.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers at an important meeting in 2009. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)On Sunday, The New York Times profiled Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University and a leading advocate of Modern Monetary Theory (commonly known as MMT). According to the newspaper, MMT “posits that if a government controls its own currency and needs money—to make sure its citizens have food and places to live when, say, a global pandemic pushes many out of work—it can just print it, as long as its economy has the ability to churn out the needed goods and services.” The article situates MMT as a heterodox idea within the field of economics, but one that is gaining traction in politics.
Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, himself a very public economist and subject to many political controversies in his years of public service, had an allergic reaction to the article. He tweeted out a long response that boiled down to saying that MMT was a crackpot idea unworthy of being treated seriously by the Times.
Lawrence H. Summers @LHSummersI am sorry to see the @nytimes taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement. It is the equivalent of publicizing fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories.
Is This What Winning Looks Like?Modern Monetary Theory, the buzziest economic idea in decades, got a pandemic tryout of sorts. Now inflation is testing its limits.nytimes.comFebruary 6th 2022
765 Retweets3,762 LikesIn his Twitter thread, he compared MMT to creationism and contrasted it to other forms of heterodoxy (Marxist and post Keynesian scholarship) that did deserve an airing. Quick to establish his intellectual large-mindedness, Summers claimed, “I am all for intellectual diversity and wish that the NYT would give more attention to Marxist scholars like Steve Marglin, whose book Raising Keynes deserves extensive debate, or other left scholars like Tom Palley, Dean Baker or Jamie [James] Galbraith.”
There are many problems with Summers arguments. For one thing, some of the economists he cites as examples of probity worthy of having their ideas aired (notably Dean Baker and James Galbraith) take a very favorable view of MMT, which they see as belonging on the continuum of Keynesian analysis. On June 9, 2020, Baker praised for an op-ed Kelton wrote in The New York Times. “Great piece laying out the basic Modern Monetary Theory account ( I would say also Keynesian),” Baker wrote in a tweet. “It would be great if we could get the 60 Reps who want to crash the economy to read it.” In a 2020 column, Galbraith praised MMT as “an example of good economics made popular, accessible, and democratic.”
In short, if Summers is saying that Baker and Galbraith are serious scholars who deserve being debated and Baker and Galbraith say MMT has validity, then there is no ground to summarily dismiss MMT as crackpottery unworthy of attention.
As it happens, Summers’ call to deplatform MMT falls into a pattern: Summers has a long history of haughtily rejecting voices who deserve hearing. Binyamin Appelbaum, in his fine book The Economists’ Hour (2015), documents how in 1998 while serving as Deputy Treasury Secretary, Summers shut down efforts to regulate the banking industries abuse of credit derivatives, a root cause of the 2008 global economic collapse. The efforts were led by Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Summers called Born into his office and screamed “I have 13 bankers in my office who tell me you're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.” In fact, the scuttling of this reform insured that banking abuses continued, leading to a collapse that did end up being the worst financial crisis since, well, the end of World War II.
In a 2005 conference celebrating Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan—a man who shared all of Summers’ illusions—University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan suggested that financial innovations (such as the de-regulated credit default swap market) were increasing risk. Summers dismissed Rajan as “slightly Luddite.” As Applebaum notes, “Summer, echoing his attack on Born a few years earlier, added that even talking about these things was disruptive.”
Larry Summers has rarely, if ever, been upheld as an exemplar of intellectual humility. One could, in fact, make a much longer list of Summers displaying belligerent arrogance. There was 1991 memo he signed claiming, “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.” Summers later claimed that the memo was drafted by an underling and used “inflammatory” language to make a theoretical point rather than advance a policy agenda.
There’s also the many controversies around Summer’s tumultuous tenure as president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, which ended with a faculty revolt that forced Summers to resign.
As I noted in a 2020 Nation column:
Summers’s stormy tenure as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006 was cut short by a faculty revolt, motivated by his browbeating of African American professors such as Cornel West, his claim that women weren’t doing well in the sciences because of innate cognitive inferiority in their math skills, and his support of a protégé who had run roughshod over conflict-of-interest regulations while running an economic reform program in Russia. (In recent years, a fresh controversy has emerged from Summers’s tenure as Harvard president involving donations from the notorious child molester Jeffrey Epstein).
All these controversies have led Summers to lose status. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever hold a high government post again, not least because any hearings would lead to the resurfacing of these sordid matters.
But despite his diminished reputation, Summers still thinks he deserves to decide which economic theories deserve to be publicly debated. He retains easy access to many journalistic venues and has used his prominence to make comments undermining Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and any other expansive attempt at economic reform.
Is Summers right that MMT is crackpottery? That’s an issue for economists and policymakers to debate rather than something for Summers to arbitrate. But it’s worth thinking about the role of heterodox thinking in economics.
In the 1930s all sorts of heterodox panaceas flourished with the promise of solving economic distress: social credit, the Townsend Plan, and technocracy. Many of these ideas are fairly described as crank remedies. But their popularity forced the political elites of many countries to come to terms with the fact that there was a system wide economic problem, one not amenable to traditional solutions. This agitation opened the path for genuine solutions: greater social democracy and Keynesian management of the business cycle.
Whatever the merits or demerits of MMT, it is serving the same role of agitating for new solutions and expanding policy debate. Someone with a pronounced bias towards the status quo, such as Summers, is naturally hostile to this expansion of the intellectual horizon. But there’s no reason to listen to Larry Summers on this.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Denzel Washington as MacbethFor the first time in his career Joel Coen has made a movie without his brother, Ethan. But the lost sibling has been replaced by a more than worthy partner, William Shakespeare. Coen’s adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth (now streaming in Apple TV and playing in theaters) is a stellar achievement: it’s a two layered film that is both Coen-esque and Shakespeare.
I talked with Doug Bell, a regular guest on the podcast, about this wonderful film. Along the way we discuss the themes of infertility, fate and murder in the Coen filmography; the previous adaptations of Macbeth by Orson Welles, Justin Kurzel, Akira Kurosawa; the acting chops of the cast, headed by Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington; the fusion of theater and film; and the role of demonic evil running through the works of both the Coen Brothers and Shakespeare.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Jason Epstein in his home, Sag Harbor, New York, 1984. (Photo by Susan Wood/Getty Images)One day in late 1963, while walking along Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, the Doubleday editor Barbara Epstein ran into her friend Elizabeth Hardwick, an essayist. Out of that chance encounter, the two women agreed on a spur of the moment dinner party, to be hosted by Epstein and her then husband Jason, an editor at Random House. The party was a small affair with only four attendees: the Epsteins, Hardwick and her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. During the meal, the conversation turned to the newspaper strike, then depriving New Yorkers of reading material, including book reviews. Hardwick had in 1959 written a piece for Harper’s decrying the sad state of American book reviewing. The conjunction of the strike and Hardwick’s complaint led Jason Epstein to put forward a longstanding plan of his: an American version of the Times Literary Supplement. They conjured up the publication that became The New York Review of Books.
Jason Epstein, the last survivor of that fabled dinner party, died on Friday at age 93. He was one of America’s most innovative and forward thinking cultural entrepreneurs. In the 1950s, he was the mastermind behind the quality paperback revolution, which allowed books by scholars and modernist writers find a mass audience in the burgeoning academic world. He was a key instigator of The Library of America. Less successfully, but still displaying his characteristic foresight, he pushed for online selling before Amazon and sponsored print on demand technology.
Much will be written about Epstein in the coming weeks and years. Not least, he was in cherished editor by writers like Jane Jacobs, E.L. Doctorow, Jean Strouse and W.H. Auden.
In 2001 I reviewed for the National Post two similarly titled books written by men who didn’t like each other: Epstein’s The Book Business and Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books. The review offers some insights into the legacies of both men.
Jason Epstein and Andre SchiffrinEven among bookish people, editors are rarely heroes. Poets, novelists and even journalists can be inspirational figures who battle the world to get their truths out. Editors, by contrast, are about as exciting as chartered accountants: However necessary their work may be to the operation of the firm, they exude an air of banality.
Andre Schiffrin and Jason Epstein are therefore two rare figures: editors who inspire passionate love and hate. When Schiffrin was fired as chief editor of Pantheon Books in 1990, hundreds of writers, including Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver Sacks, picketed the headquarters of Random House, the parent company that ordered his dismissal.
Random House itself was torn into two factions, those who believed that Schiffrin's firing marked the end of quality publishing at the firm and those who thought Schiffrin deserved to be sacked because his imprint wasn't making money. (Because Random House had only one owner, tycoon S.I. Newhouse, the exact nature of Pantheon's financial condition remains a mystery).
In the wake of Schiffrin's firing, almost the entire editorial staff of Pantheon quit in protest, and scores of best-selling writers (notably cartoonist Matt Groening and popular historian Studs Terkel) stopped publishing with Random House. "Everything I am as an author is because of Andre," Terkel noted bitterly. "The barbarians have taken over at Pantheon, and they might as well be producing detergent."
Jason Epstein, then editorial director of Random House, led the anti-Schiffrin faction, arguing that "we have to earn a profit in order to earn the right to publish the books we want. Why on earth Andre Schiffrin doesn't understand that is beyond me." (In point of fact, simply by antagonizing Groening, the phenomenally successful creator of The Simpsons, Random House lost a small fortune by firing Schiffrin).
Ironically, a decade later, Epstein and Schiffrin have written strikingly similar memoirs with almost identical titles, The Book Business and The Business of Books. Both books combine personal history with polemics to produce remarkably congruent accounts of the shifting fortunes of the publishing world. As so often in life, our bitterest feuds are with those with whom we have the most in common.
Throughout their careers, Epstein and Schiffrin both used commercial publishing strategies to market intellectually challenging books. It was this shared goal that made them rivals within Random House. As journalist Thomas Maier notes, well before Schiffrin was fired "these two talented editors seemed to resent each other deeply and jockeyed for the intellectual high ground."
Epstein and Schiffrin both entered publishing in the early 1950s. At that time, as Epstein notes, "book publishing was a small-scale, highly personal industry." Indeed, even the largest and best known firms were still family-run businesses. Pantheon Books, for example, was started in 1942 by Schiffrin's father, a Jewish refugee who fled Vichy France.
Being run by families, these "small, elegant, amiable firms" were content with meagre but steady profits. Knowing their families would own the firm for years to come, publishers balanced their lists by bringing out both best-sellers (which generated short-term cash) and more difficult books that took longer to find an audience. Random House, for example, published William Faulkner for decades at a loss. When Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949, they suddenly possessed a valuable backlist of his titles. It was this balance between popular and prestigious books that allowed quality publishing to thrive in mid-century America.
As young Turks, Epstein and Schiffrin made their names with their shared insight that the post-war expansion of higher education opened up a valuable new market for quality books. Students, many of them from poorer households, flooded into universities throughout the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the 1950s, paperbacks were largely pulp sold at corner drugstores: Mickey Spillane's brutal detective novels were the quintessential softcovers of the era. Epstein and Schiffrin realized that there was a market for quality paperbacks -- cheap enough for students but durable enough for class- room use -- that reprinted intellectually challenging books.
Epstein created the Anchor Book line for Doubleday while Schiffrin followed suit by initiating Signet Books for the New American Library. It turned out T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner could both be sold in a format previously reserved for schlock. Both these imprints went on to make millions for their firms, inspiring the paperback revolution in American publishing.
But the success of the paperback revolution paved the way for changes in publishing that Epstein and Schiffrin were to regret. Large corporate interests suddenly became aware of publishing as a possible "profit centre." Random House, which had bought out Pantheon in 1961, was in turn bought out by a succession of large corporate firms, starting with RCA in 1965.
In the mid-1960s, when these buyouts were fresh news, corporate ownership did little to influence what got published. In retrospect, the 1960s were glory days for Epstein and Schiffrin. Working for different divisions of Random House, they were both able to publish serious, challenging books that found large audiences. In part they were helped by the fact that they were in tune with the times. Both men combined left-liberal politics with cultural sophistication in a way that became popular in the 1960s. In 1963 Epstein co-founded The New York Review of Books, a characteristically successful publication which fused stylish literary taste with strong left- liberal politics.
Moreover, both editors were blessed with a knack for discovering and nurturing talent. With Epstein's assistance, urban critic Jane Jacobs published her influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities while Schiffrin brought out important books by French social thinker Michel Foucault and historian E.P. Thompson.
Not all difficult books find an audience, and even those that do sometime take years to catch on. Foucault for example, was initially coldly received in North America, although he is now one of the world's most influential philosophers. Schiffrin's strategy at Pantheon was the classic publishing tactic of balancing bestsellers with prestigious works. Matt Groening's cartoon books brought in piles of cash, allowing the firm to subsidize more demanding authors, such as Foucault, until they also found their audience.
Unfortunately, the bottom-line managers of Random House had little sympathy with this strategy. By their lights, it made more sense to simply publish Groening, take the money and run. This short- term thinking derives from the fact that corporate owners hold on to publishing firms for much less time than founding families do. For corporate owners, bestsellers are the key to success and building up a backlist is a waste of time.
In retrospect, Schiffrin's firing resulted from the fact his traditional approach to publishing clashed with the new imperatives of corporate ownership. Pantheon was probably making money, and in the long run it promised to be even more successful, having both Groening and Foucault on its list. However, the long run didn't concern the owner (in this case, Newhouse) who simply wanted a profit centre he could sell to some other firm.
Although Epstein has little sympathy with Schiffrin's personal fate, he too believes that the corporate takeover of publishing has been a disaster. "Conglomerate budgets require efficiencies and create structures that are incompatible with the notorious vagaries of literary production, work whose outcome can only be intuited ... Meanwhile, the retail market for books is now dominated by a few large bookstore chains whose high operating costs demand high rates of turnover, and therefore a constant supply of bestsellers, an impossible goal but one to which publishers have become perforce committed." In this economic environment, the largest firms are much less likely to publish quality books.
Because Epstein and Schiffrin have strong track records in forseeing publishing trends, both their books are being marketed as exercises in prophecy, promising to tell the shape of the book- selling future. Rather naively, Epstein hopes that new computer technologies such as the Web will solve publishing's problems. In the electronic book future, Epstein predicts, big-name authors such as Stephen King will publish their own works. This will allow publishers to move away from marketing bestsellers and concentrate once again on their essential task of cultivating quality writers.
Also, because the Web will allow all books to stay in print forever, building a strong backlist will once again be a key concern. "Book publishing may therefore become once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative autonomous units."
Unfortunately, Epstein's own venture into online publishing (The Reader's Catalogue, a forerunner in many ways to Amazon.com) was unsuccessful. As Epstein admits, no one has yet figured out how to make money selling books on the Web. Moreover, as Schiffrin and others have noted, there is every reason to believe that large corporations will dominate on-line publishing. Epstein's vision of a return to old-fashioned craft values is charming but unconvincing.
Schiffrin, for his part, has tried to return to the older style of publishing by starting a non-profit firm, the New Press, which is supported by foundation grants. In the last decade, the New Press has in fact published hundreds of books, some of which have been highly successful. Epstein has also used foundation grants to start the wonderful Library of America series, which is keeping the classics of U.S. literature in print in sturdy editions. Yet it is unlikely that these models can be widely imitated, since there is only so much charitable money around.
In the end, it seems likely that quality publishing will be taken over by very small firms run by highly committed eccentrics who are willing to live cheap. "Good literature is produced by a few queer people in odd corners," T.S. Eliot once said. The same may be true of publishing.
Despite this dispiriting conclusion, neither Epstein nor Schiffrin seem unhappy. Looking over the course of their lives, they can see that they've been lucky to make money doing what they love. Their success as editors derived from their ability to work closely with creative writers, a quality that shines forth in these memoirs. Both books are rich in anecdote and literary lore.
Epstein, in particular, is at his best when he gives a loving account of Random House when it was still a small firm housed in a downtown New York mansion. "My office ... had been a bedroom, and from time to time I came to work and found a wayward author who had spent the night there, not always alone. These offices were a second home for authors as well as ourselves. Mrs. Debanzie, our Scottish receptionist, usually sent them upstairs to see us unannounced: W.H. Auden in torn overcoat and carpet slippers delivering the manuscript of The Dyer's Hand; Ted Geisel, know as Dr. Seuss, arriving with his storyboards to recite Green Eggs and Ham to us ... John O'Hara in a three-piece suit showing off his Rolls-Royce in the courtyard on a sunny day; Ralph Ellison in my office, smoking a cigar and explaining with his hands how Thelonious Monk developed his chords."
Because of moments like this, one hopes Epstein will stop gazing into the hazy future of publishing and write a full-length memoir.
Recent Cultural TalkFor more recent cultural coverage on this newsletter, you can listen to the podcasts on Norman Mailer, The New Yorker and The French Dispatch, Aaron Sorkin’s checkered oeuvre and the film Passing.
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Bund rally in New York, 1939 (Bettmann / Getty)Fascist symbolism is ubiquitous in our culture—it’s a rare anti-vaxx protest that doesn’t display a swastika, usually as a way of criticizing supposedly authoritarian health measures, but also at times as a sincere expression of ideology. There’s been a long-running debate about whether contemporary right-wing authoritarians like Donald Trump can properly be described as fascist. Does the fascist metaphor cloud over more than it reveals?
In a recent column in Gawker, John Ganz wrote, “one part of the present age is the fracturing and fading of a shared sense of the meaning of the Holocaust and the Nazi era.” Prime examples of this tendency include the recent fracas over a Tennessee school board removing Art Spiegelman’s Maus from the curriculum and Whoopi Goldberg’s two-week suspension from The View after her ill-informed comments about the Nazi persecution of the Jews not being “about race.”
Amid the current confusion, John has been a voice of clarity. On his substack Unpopular Front, he’s done a series of posts on the parallels between various early 20th century fascist movements (particularly the failed fascists of Third Republic France) with 21st century counterparts. John’s writing on this topic is distinguished by its wide reading, creative synthesis of the scholarly literature, and its explanatory power. He’s also consistently engaged with people he’s disagreed with in a charitable and good faith manner. Given this, I was very eager to record a podcast to go over his thinking on these issues.
(Posted edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Threat inflation from anti-war Tucker Carlson (screenshot from Fox News)When I interviewed Glenn Greenwald for my podcast, he made reference to a right-wing anti-war position which he saw running from Charles Lindbergh to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. I dissented by noting that many of these figure weren’t really anti-war but rather selectively opposed to escalating certain conflicts in order to shore up resources and alliances needed to fight other wars. Lindbergh’s willingness to crown Adolf Hitler as overlord of Europe was motivated in part by sympathy for Nazi policies and desire for Germany to fight the USSR. Other so-called anti-war right-wingers, ranging from the John Birch Society to Pat Buchanan, have historically supported all sorts of military interventions, typically in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. The putative isolationism of a Lindbergh or a Buchanan usually meant a reluctance to get involved in European affairs coupled with militarism. The two attitudes go together naturally: European intervention is seen as restricting the ability of the USA to operate as a unilateral power in other regions.
My arguments were clearly not persuasive to Greenwald since he continues to tout Carlson as anti-war (or at least “more anti-war”).
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwaldGlad to see DSA joining Tucker Carlson and other members of the more anti-war wing of the American right in finally urging this. This is the coalition that can finally provide a meaningful impediment to endless US militarism that benefits only a tiny sector in Washington. DSA International Committee 🌹 @DSA_Intl_Comm
DSA IC opposes US brinkmanship in Ukraine, which only further escalates the crisis, and calls for an end to NATO imperialist expansionism. We urge anti-war activists to oppose military escalations and demand a lasting diplomatic solution! #NoWarWithRussia https://t.co/Y7dRAxhXa5February 1st 2022
149 Retweets941 LikesMy skepticism towards the anti-war right has been shaped by the historian John Lukacs. In Outgrowing Democracy (first published in 1984), he wrote:
[T]he isolationism of the twenties, too, was inconsistent as well as incomplete. The demand and the desire for isolation from Europe was often strongest among the same Americans who were in favor of American expansion—at least of American missionary and business expansion—in the Pacific and in the Far East. (But, then, for some Americans Asia has always been the Farthest West, not the Far East.)
Elsewhere Lukacs notes that during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was bedevilled by former isolationists who wanted him to follow an “Asia First” policy (i.e. focus war efforts on fighting Japan rather than Germany).
On January 24, Tucker Carlson discussed the Russia/Ukraine imbroglio on his nightly show. I was struck by how close Carlson’s argument was to the right-wing perspective of the early 20th century, which Lukacs analyzed. Carlson argued that American intervention on behalf of Ukraine was not in the USA’s national interest but in fact counter-productive, since it would strengthen the real foe that needs addressing, China. “But what's not at all complicated is who benefits from our conflict with Russia,” Carlson argued. “China benefits. Period. The Chinese government is the only certain winner here.”
Elbridge Colby, a former Trump administration official and guest on Carlson’s show, made the point even more explicitly, saying:
China is by far the biggest challenge to American interests in the way that you're talking about it at home, which is really going to affect our economy, our lives, our prosperity, and our freedoms.
And look, the future of the world is going to be settled in Asia. It is going to be over 50 percent of global GDP. Europe is moving down to 10 percent and so, I think you're right. I mean, the Ukraine situation may concern us to some degree, but it's far, far from the most significant thing and the fundamental reality is we have to make choices.
Greenwald argues that there is an overlap in anti-war policy between Tucker Carlson and the Democratic Socialists of America. But that overlap is an optical illusion. The DSA is call for a diplomatic solution to the border dispute between Russia and Ukraine. Carlson is hinting at a policy close to what Steve Bannon argues for: an alliance between the United States and Russia against China. This is not an anti-war position but simply one group of militarists who want to aim the guns in particular direction. There’s no strengthening of actual anti-war politics, which would necessarily involve a push for diplomatic solutions rather than letting Russia get its way so it can be won over as an ally.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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At a rally on Saturday, former president Donald Trump hailed “those great Canadian truckers” who are “who are resisting bravely these lawless mandates and doing more to defend American freedom than our own leaders by far.”
Acyn @AcynTrump: We want those great Canadian Truckers to know we are with them all the way January 30th 2022
192 Retweets592 LikesTrump was, of course, speaking about the “freedom convoy” that converged on Ottawa over the weekend to protest government covid policies. The continuing protest is small in number: about a 1,000 trucks with (generously) 10,000 people. By point of comparison, the 2019 climate protests in Canada saw one million people take to the streets, including roughly half a million in Montreal.
The freedom convoy is getting attention out of proportion to its size. It is very disruptive, with reports of vandalism and scuffles. Some in the Canadian media and political establishment have decried disrespect shown to statues of heroes like Terry Fox (famed for his work in raising money for cancer research) and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There were confederate flags and swastikas on display. More broadly, the protests are evidence of much more mobilized and radicalized Canadian right that has emerged during the pandemic.
To assess the convoy, I talked to the freelance journalist Nora Loreto, who has been doing some of the best coverage of the pandemic in Canada. Nora’s work can be found her substack. She’s the author of the new book Spin Doctors about media and political failures in addressing covid. Nora and I took up the question of the nature of the protests but also the wider political failure that is allowing the extremist right to exploit popular discontent.We also discuss the racism of some of the protestors, and the conspicuously small number of people of color in the convoy—especially striking when you consider that nearly 20% of Canadian truckers are of South Asian descent. We also take up the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on poor and racialized Canadians as well as the way the latest wave is causing greater disillusionment and anomie.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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A young woman walks past a World War II-era Soviet T-34 tank in Kyiv, Ukraine (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)Early in 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. This annexation, along with the illegal occupation of parts of the border, continue to this day. This long festering conflict now threatens to break out into a wider war as thousands of Russian troops amass along the border. Amid thwarted diplomacy and rumours of war, I thought it was good to get an overview of the situation and turned to frequent guest David Klion. David has written about foreign policy for The Nation and New Republic and has a specific background on this topic. He did both undergraduate and graduate studies on Russian history and culture, speaks Russian, and has spent time in both Ukraine and Russia.
In our conversation, we take up the end of the Cold War, the controversies over the decision to expand NATO, Russian grievances against the West, the revanchist program of restoring Russia’s sphere of influence in Central Europe, the dangers of mixed signals, and Biden’s pursuit of a precarious middle path between hawkishness and dovishness.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly in 1986I first became aware of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in the summer 1981 when I was 14 years old. Spiegelman had just started serializing the first chapters of his eventual graphic novel in the pages of RAW, a graphic art magazine he edited with Francoise Mouly. I saw a review of the first issue of RAW in The Comics Journal. I was intrigued by the excerpts The Comics Journal featured of Maus, an anthropomorphic account of the experience of Spiegelman’s father Vladek during the Holocaust told with the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. At the time, RAW was a little outside my price range (and carried an amusingly daunting blurb that it was “the graphix magazine of postponed suicides”). I was able to furtively look at some early issues at Pages, a Toronto book store, and fully caught up with Maus by 1986, when the first half of it appeared in book form.
Maus was at the forefront of efforts in the 1980s to push for comics to become more literary. Even at the time, young as I was, I thought Maus was one of the very few really good comics, along with the works of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. I would later go on to write a biography of Mouly that tried to situate the importance of RAW and Maus in cultural history.
I shared the book with my school friend David Berman, whose father was a Holocaust survivor. David, not at all a comics person, was also very impressed by it, as were his parents. I remember David telling me how much the cantankerous relationship between Vladek and Art Spiegelman mirrored his own relationship with his father. One of the advantages of the book was it could be read by both young and old— later on, David’s nephews and nieces read the book as young teens
On Tuesday, the McMinn County Board of education in Tennessee decided to remove Maus, which had been taught to grade eight students, from the curriculum. The minutes of the meeting make for dispiriting reading. They make clear that the reasons the board objected to the book are as much about the history it records as the ostensible reasons (the use of some mild cursing in the form of “bitch” and “god damn” as well as a supposed “nude” image).
At one point, board member Tony Allman says, “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.” It’s hard to imagine any honest book about the Holocaust that doesn’t deal with the killing of kids.
Another board member, Mike Cochran, says, “I thought the end was stupid to be honest with you. A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father, so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff. It’s just the opposite, instead of treating his father with some kind of respect, he treated his father like he was the victim.” The scene Cochran is describing is from the end of the first volume, where Art Spiegelman learns that his father had destroyed his late mother’s diaries. Those diaries are important for many reasons, not least because Spiegelman’s mom committed suicide and they might provide clues as to the experiences that led to that tragedy. Art is enraged and fights with his father, saying, “God damn you!” Art yells. “You – you murderer! How the hell could you do such a thing!!”
This is no doubt a harsh scene. It’s also one of the crucial moments in the book, because it shows how the Holocaust shaped the Spiegelman family long after it was over, leaving them with all sorts of unprocessed traumas and fights over memory. To have a scene where the son was dutifully respectful of the father at all times would have been a lie and it would also have destroyed the human meaning of the book, the honesty that made it speak to so many readers.
Controversial scene from MausThe board members spend a lot of time talking about what they call the “nude scene.” Tony Allmann in particular is hung up on the fact that Spiegelman once, in the late 1970s, drew for Playboy. “I may be wrong, but this guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for Playboy,” Allman says. “You can look at his history, and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.” It’s hard not to escape the suspicion that Allman is conflating graphic novel with the phrase graphic sex.
This all puzzled me because I didn’t remember anything salacious in Maus at all. New York Times reporter Jane Coaston solved the mystery by noting that the “nudity” in Maus is a scene were the prisoners in Auschwitz are stripped naked and beaten.
Jane Coaston @janecoastonI'd like to note here that this is what the "nudity" in "Maus" looks like. January 26th 2022
465 Retweets2,308 LikesAgain, this is a simple historical reality and the actual photos of the naked prisoners are far more shocking than Spiegelman’s stylized anthropomorphic mice. One of the virtues of Spiegelman’s decision to work with a more abstract style is that it makes it possible to narrate horrific events that become numbing when presented with greater verisimilitude.
In a podcast earlier this week, Alex Shephard and I talked about the many purely fanciful examples of cancel culture that are being touted by pundits: the hypothetical or fictional cancellations of Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Blazing Saddles. This cancel culture discourse is incredibly silly but it’s harmful. It promulgates a myth of widespread censorship by progressives which helps cloud over the real types of censorship that do actually happen. The removal of Maus from the curriculum shows us the true face of censorship in a concerted effort to avoid painful historical realities like the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it comes at the same time as the anti-CRT moral panic which is encouraging the banning of books about slavery and racism. Over the last year, there’s been an upsurge in books being challenged in schools and libraries in the United States, with graphic novels and books about LGBTQ people and people of color being particularly likely to be targeted.
The false narrative of cancel culture is a handmaiden to true censorship.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
POSTSCRIPT: In the above post I accepted the idea that the “nude” pictures in Maus that provoked objection were from the concentration camp scene. But as reader Ben Carlsen points out, it’s more likely the objects were to two panels showing Spiegelman’s mother Anja naked in the bathtub. These panels appear in the comics-within-a-comics section of Maus titled Prisoner of the Hell Planet. I’ll simply note that the strip is drawn in wood-cut style, so highly stylized. The nudity isn’t sexual or gratuitous but crucial to the narrative. And Anja Spiegelman’s story is crucial to Maus’s grappling with the intergenerational and lasting trauma of the Holocaust. Many students will have had suicide in the family and I think a work like Maus helps make the pain and guilt of that experience easier to talk about.
Panel from Spiegelman’s Prisoner of the Hell PlanetThree panels from Spiegelman’s Prisoner of the Hell PlanetShare and SubscribeIf you enjoyed this post, please share:
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Protest in Hong Kong in 2017 featuring Trump imitator (ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)Norman Mailer was a pioneer in public political obscenity. In 1969, the writer-provocateur ran for mayor of New York with the promise that he would turn the city into the 51st state. The slogan Mailer ran on was “No More Bullshit.” His candidacy was, of course, an unlikely one, perhaps even a stunt. He got only 5% of the vote in the race to become the Democratic party’s nominee. His profane slogan did little to enhance his credibility and was only alluded to euphemistically by respectable papers like the New York Times.
Historians record all sorts of salty language from politicians, like Abraham Lincoln (who went in for scatological humor) or Lyndon Johnson (who liked to boast that “I do know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad”). But these profanities were not meant for mass consumption and tended to come to light only in the memoirs of hangers on, many years after the leaders were dead.
Mailer’s obscenity, on the other hand, was intentional and confrontational. It came at a time when many in the public still expected some decorum from elected officials. When the Watergate tapes were made public in 1974, newspapers had to frequently resort to the phrase “[expletive deleted]” to shield the public from the many four-letter words used by President Richard Nixon and his cronies. Remarkably, the news that the president had a sailor’s tongue in the Oval Office contributed to his loss of popular support. The Chicago Tribune, one of the most pro-Republican newspapers in America, turned on Nixon with the complaint, “He is devious. He is vacillating. He is profane.”
But the days of such prissy concern over foul language is long past. On Monday, Joe Biden had a hot mic moment when he responded with off color words to a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy who asked, “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?” Biden, who has had frequent verbal sparring matches with Doocy probably thought the microphone was off and muttered, “No, it’s a great asset — more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.”
Biden was quick to apologize and Doocy himself dismissed the matter. It’s likely to blow over, which is a sign of significant historical change.
As obscenity has become more commonplace in culture (certainly much more pervasive now in movies, television and fiction), it has also become much more acceptable in politics. Again, Mailer is an emblematic figure. His first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) had characters saying “fug” as a way to get around the fact that no publisher would allow the word “fuck.” This led to the apocryphal story of Mailer being accosted at a party by some grand dame (sometimes the Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead, sometimes the wit Dorothy Parker) who demanded to know if he was the young man who didn’t know how to spell “fuck.” Mailer’s subsequent frequent recourse to rude words was surely a way to move beyond that initial embarrassing submission to the forces of prudery.
Today, the forces of vulgarity have won. And not just because of the relaxing of editorial standards. In politics, the rise of populism and the breakdown of elite consensus has created a space for politicians to use coarse words as way of signaling a complex variety of messages: authenticity, anger, and a willingness to fight.
There are numerous examples from both political parties. In 2015, Bernie Sanders implored supporters not to let anyone tell them that “politics is bullshit.” Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, told New York Magazine in 2017 that “if we’re not helping people, we should go the fuck home.” That same year, Tom Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that “if you don’t have the trust of the community, then you ain’t got shit,” and later, at a rally, opined that “Republican leaders and President Trump don’t give a shit about the people they were trying to hurt” with their Obamacare alternative.
Donald Trump has been at the forefront of this shift on the Republican side. In 2011, he said his message to China would be, “Listen you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent!” In 2015, Trump said he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Last year, he said U.S. businesses returning from Mexico can “go fuck themselves.”
The example of Trump is clarifying. Some object to him as a vulgarian unworthy of high office. But if you examine his comments, what is obscene is not the words but the attitudes the words convey: the bullying, the arrogance, and the threatened violence. The words he chooses are helping make these traits clear.
The rise of political profanity is salutary. It’s a move away from false civility and a pretend consensus towards a more open expression of goals. While Biden should perhaps refrain from insulting individual reporters, there’s no reason for him to refrain from being blunt towards those who earn rebuke. If 2024 shapes up to be a rematch between Biden and Trump, then the current president should not hesitate to call his rival a stupid son of a bitch.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Norman Mailer being kicked out of boxing match in 1962 (Getty)In a January 3 post, I expressed skepticism about Michael Wolff’s reporting that Norman Mailer was the victim of cancel culture. Subsequent reporting by Alex Shephard in The New Republic has lent ammunition to my argument that Wolff was conflating the decline of Mailer’s reputation with active censorship and that he was spreading an unfounded narrative that scapegoated junior publishing staffers for the unwillingness of their employers to invest in maintaining Mailer’s literary reputation.
Reading Alex’s piece, it occurred to me that Mailer is one of many examples of a new media genre: the conjectural cancellation, whereby a purely hypothetical story of suppression is put forward as evidence of widespread censorship. This post on Bari Weiss’ substack by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, for example, claims that Blazing Saddles and Rocky could not be made in today’s Hollywood. A recent Ross Douthat column, for another example, defends Joan Didion from a cancellation her legacy does not face, and in fact was only supposed, imagined, by Douthat for the purposes of defending her against it.
Why are some commentators mongering fear of cancellations that have not happened yet? Is it because cancel culture is now a bogeyman, totally without any reference point in reality? And how does this genre of imaginary cancellation hamper our understanding of the real state of culture? For this episode of the podcast, Alex, who covers culture for The New Republic, and I discussed these and other matters. Along the way we take up the issue of what is living and what is dead in the legacy of Norman Mailer.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Members of The Vile Body, a group formed by Terry Teachout. Standing: Walter Olson, Maggie Gallagher, Roger Kimball, Bruce Bawer, Dana Mack Seated: Susan and Richard Vigilante, Terry Teachout, George Sim Johnston. (Photo by Mario Ruiz/Getty Images)There’s been an outpouring of heartfelt tributes to Teachout by those who knew him. This fine piece by Sarah Weinman is one of many. I, too, wrote an obituary for the man, which first ran in The Nation on January 20th and is available below.
One thing that I didn’t get into in my obituary was Teachout’s strong advocacy of regional theatre. He used his position as drama critic for The Wall Street Journal to cover plays all over America. This was connected with his midwestern roots. It’s an important legacy, which Matt Zoller Seitz writes about here.
Perhaps another thing I should have emphasized is that there was a crucial difference between Teachout and the earlier National Review cohort made up of Didion, Kenner, Wills and Davenport. The 1960s National Review group were almost all committed modernists. Teachout came of age when modernism was more distant. Although he didn’t call himself a postmodernist, and indeed would have loathed the association, he did share with a certain type of postmodernist the desire to break with modernist elitism, and a friendliness towards mass culture and middle-brow art.
I could also have said more about Teachout having founded, in the late 1980s, the conservative salon The Vile Body. It was very much part of the Anglophilic Wauvian affectation of a certain style of elite conservatives. Connected to all this was Teachout’s love of the excellent movie Metropolitan (1990), made by his friend Whit Stillman.
Terry Teachout, RIP
The critic and dramatist Terry Teachout had many friends, so news of his death at age 65 on January 13 spread very quickly. I heard about it that afternoon, shortly after listening to the episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy dealing with the recent death of another prominent writer: Joan Didion. The podcast and Teachout’s death became quickly intertwined in my mind not just because of the coincidence of timing. Didion and Teachout were both exemplars of a kind of literate and skeptical cultural conservatism that with their deaths now seems a preciously rare commodity. The United States in 2022 is awash in conservatives trying to ignite a culture war, but now there aren’t many conservatives engaged in genuine cultural conversation and debate.
Podcast hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell were joined by Sam Tanenhaus and approached Didion from a particular angle, focusing on her start as a writer for National Review from 1960 to ’66. In the ’50s and ’60s, National Review had a distinguished “back of the book” that published some of the very early works of not just Didion but also Garry Wills, Arlene Croce, John Leonard, Hugh Kenner, and Guy Davenport. These writers were all metropolitan but skeptical of liberalism, which they often saw as sentimental and doctrinaire. They tended to be aristocratic modernists who prized the well-honed, irony-rich sentence. In the later 1960s, under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the rise of a more populist right with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, many of these writers became disenchanted with National Review and either moved left or become more apolitical.
The best of these writers, notably Wills and Didion, undertook a complex self-deconstruction whereby they applied the same acidic skepticism to their own politics as to liberalism. Along the way, they often found a much larger and politically diverse readership in more mainstream publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. But a kind of philosophical, non-political conservatism continued to shape their thinking.
Terry Teachout was a full generation younger than this cohort, but he followed their arc: He got his start with National Review but eventually embraced a more philosophical and nonpolitical strain of conservatism. While he continued to write for National Review and other conservative publications, his work addressed a wider audience and eschewed the liberal-baiting that dominates right-wing political discourse. As The New York Times noted in its obituary, Teachout over time came to prefer “to work in an apolitical register, assessing art and culture on their own terms.” In this way, he was the last of the National Review line of conservative cultural critics that started with Wills and Didion.
Teachout achieved this status by the dint of enormous effort. He was born in Cape Girardeau, Mo., in 1955, the son of a hardware salesman and a secretary. He titled his autobiography City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy and always spoke warmly of the virtues of Midwestern culture, its plainspoken humility, its earnestness and civility. But if he grew up a small-town boy, he didn’t remain one. His hunger for the world of arts and letters proved too great. He read voraciously and then began to write nearly as much. One of the first novelists he championed was his fellow Midwesterner Dawn Powell. John Updike once described Powell as belonging to that cadre of “Midwestern writers” like Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser “who felt something epic in the national shift from rural to urban, from provincial sequestration to metropolitan liberation.” Teachout was part of that same epic journey from the hinterland to the big city—and he, too, was in pursuit of metropolitan liberation.
Once in the big city, Teachout made precisely this journey toward metropolitan sophistication. National Review, Commentary, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal featured his writing about about Frank Sinatra and Glenn Gould, Veronica Geng and Tennessee Williams, Evelyn Waugh and Bret Easton Ellis. The sheer range of his interests was daunting: the high and the low, Bugs Bunny cartoons and Balanchine, Stephen Sondheim and Whit Stillman, as well as, of course, novelists like Cather and Powell.
I first encountered Teachout’s name in the pages of National Review, where he started as a freelance book reviewer in 1981. He was still in his 20s, midway between an intermittent college career, and he wrote reviews of Miles Davis, Dashiell Hammett, and Colette. The expansiveness of his subjects was alone impressive, but his writing also already possessed his characteristic clarity, erudition, and courtliness. He was opinionated without being obnoxious and always ready with a deft quote or an apt allusion. His tastes tended toward older writers at that time out of fashion but deserving of revival, including Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson, Anthony Powell, and A.J. Liebling. The singular quality he liked most in writing was wit and stylishness, which he had a gift for discovering and quoting. After the third or fourth Teachout piece I read, he joined the list of writers whose byline I was always on the hunt for.
Teachout’s conservatism was hard to miss in these pieces. He was an admirer of Whittaker Chambers and believed not just in Chambers’s testimony (where I’m inclined to agree) but also in Chambers’s politics and analysis (to me an absurd position, since Chambers was prone to make outrageous and easily disprovable claims, such as that spies in Washington led to victory of communism in China). He also admired H.L. Mencken’s tart wit and skill at deflating progressive ideas—traits Teachout examined in the biography of Mencken that he dedicated to William F. Buckley Jr. and Joseph Epstein.
In Teachout’s rendering of Mencken, he was not just the illustrious sage of Baltimore but also the great voice of the pre–World War II Old Right and helped break the stranglehold of the genteel tradition to make room for a more robust, naturalistic literature. While Teachout celebrated Mencken’s literary talent, he also did not whitewash Mencken’s anti-Semitism, and in the book was openly critical of Mencken’s beer-hall nihilism. A similar willingness to confront uncomfortable truths can be found in Teachout’s unsparing accounts of the racism faced by the subjects of his other biographies—those of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. It’s not surprising that Teachout ended up as a Never Trump conservative.
But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, perhaps never fully confronted the politics of his conservative peers. Unlike Didion and Wills, Teachout never stopped writing for National Review. His review of a biography of Graham Greene ran in the magazine last year—a magazine that is no longer that of the Goldwater or Reagan right but one that that seems to have settled on a position of being anti-anti-Trump. Not only that, but Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort.
Beyond partisan politics, Teachout remained a cultural conservative in ways that also invited disputation. He criticized victim art and was skeptical of anything that smacked of being too theoretical or experimental. I was always struck by the fact that, while he praised the graphic novels of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes, he was cold to the work of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, whose Love and Rockets series told stories of a queer, working-class Latin American world that was perhaps outside Teachout’s comfort zone. His attempts to promote a more positive reading of middlebrow culture also always seemed a dead end. The pianist Ethan Iverson wrote a lengthy and important critique of Teachout’s Duke Ellington biography, challenging the way it promoted the myth of an undisciplined artist.
Teachout was always game for a good argument, and on social media, particularly Twitter, he was known for his openness to engaging all comers and critics. For him, conservatism signaled a commitment to tradition, to persevering and building on past achievement. It was a conservatism of memory, not of grievance and spite. This conservatism contained within it the possibilities of a political conservatism too. Tradition is all too often the banner for upholding existing hierarchies and resisting change. But for Teachout tradition could also be cosmopolitan. With his death, this strain of conservatism seems not only rare but perhaps even extinct.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler; obituary edited by David Marcus for The Nation)
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