Monday, February 10, 2025

The Resistance

There is a very striking dichotomy in the ongoing effort to counter Donald Trump and Elon Musk's war on the very idea of having a government.  On one hand, most governmental bodies have responded well; from judges blocking of the most egregious overreaches, to even the worst of Democratic governors showing some spine, to foreign leaders standing strong against aggression.  On the other hand, the business world has more or less rolled over completely, most notably with respect to trans rights:







You may notice a specific theme among the examples I selected; namely, that these are liberal institutions in largely liberal areas.  The two hospitals in question are both located in blue states, and the current leader of the NCAA is a former blue state governor.  What is more is that all of these regressive policies are associated with universities—the supposed bastions of liberal/progressive/commie thought.  If liberal governments reflect the general will of the people but the liberal institutions that serve those people do not, which of these parties has the real, meaningful power over you?   

I think it is instructive, then, to consider a similar dichotomy for Trump and Musk.  Trump, despite all of his bluster, has mostly signed a bunch of executive orders that will likely run up against many of the same problems he did last time he did all of this.  This isn't to say he can't and won't do tremendous damage on his own, but that it is necessarily limited by both the strictures of his role and the limits of his wealth.   That is not the case for Elon Musk, who appears to be bound by no such limits.  But while his current rampage is certainly a frightening escalation, it's important to understand that this power grab did not start with Trumps' inauguration.  No, the rise of Elon Musk as a shadow ruler is a long-standing, bipartisan effort:

"In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”"

Seen in this light, the liberal institutions carrying out Trump's orders with zero pushback are no longer an anomaly.  If we think of Elon Musk less as a peculiar man and more as the apotheosis of capitalist domination, then the shedding of the liberal veneer from these other capitalist institutions starts to make more sense.  Whatever supposed commitment to justice or equality that these organizations held was mere expediency on the road to further domination.  But don't take it from me, take it from this guy:



Sunday, January 26, 2025

How to Think about YIMBYs Part 5

I thought I had reached a natural endpoint in this series with my last entry, as this was as conclusive as I assumed I could get:

"The simplest (and most likely) explanation for all of these threads and more is this: YIMBYs and their analogues are fundamentally committed to capitalism, and thus can only conceive of solutions to problems through the pathways that capitalism allows for (ie. the market).  Whereas the left is committed to rights, to ideals, to people, and through much study and reflection has come to the conclusion that the only way to fully address the problems of capitalism is to transcend capitalism itself. [...] But if you really dig in and try to determine the root assumptions and the fundamental commitments of your opponents, you'll often find that these very different animating principles explain most of the contradictions between you and others who are seemingly fighting for the same outcomes."

But just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in.  This time the impetus to post came from a series of skeets by a prominent YIMBY on the famous YIMBY website BlueSky:




In all, these takes appear to indicate a bizarre category error where Resnikoff seems to confuse a sober analysis of the structural power dynamics present within a program with some sort of imagined revolutionary idealism.  I think this frankly absurd misread is a perfect example of the "contradictions" that arise from one's "animating principles," which renders my previous conclusion completely correct and insightful.  But still, it might be useful to understand why that is the case using this example of a particularly belligerent pundit.  So let's address some of Resnikoff's claims below.

"the existence of this imperfect but highly successful program is keeping the real revolution at bay"

On one hand, invoking a nebulous concept like "the real revolution" is completely irrelevant here.  Despite it's name, Jacobin is not particularly revolutionary in its aims, and the article itself does not propose a specific policy fix, let alone a full remaking of the social order.  In short, a plain reading of this comment does not square at all with the topic nor the article in question.  On the other hand, if we attempt to square this incongruity with the potential that Resnikoff is not offering his critique in particularly good faith, we can instead read this as a cartoonish interpretation of a real sentiment shared in the article:

"We are not here to solve poverty. We aren’t here to fix the affordable housing problem,” Ana Rausch, CFTH’s vice president, told the New York Times in 2022. CFTH has no control over the laws, the courts, or, for that matter, labor laws and the minimum wage. But this siloing of responsibilities is by design, permitting the housing market and policing systems to proceed apace while CFTH tends to the externalities."

Actually reading and comprehending the article allows us to understand how Resnikoff's idealistic interpretation ignores the very real structural contradiction revealed through its analysis.  Viewed through this lens, Resnikoff's complaint reads less as a legitimate critique and more of a statement of ideology—one that is largely disconnected from any sort of earnest analysis of the outcomes of the program in question.

"scurrilous plot to sap public support for socialism"

This is similar in tone and in content to the line from above, but I wanted to use it to point out another irony inherent to Resnikoff's argument. The article's primary framing is around the struggle of local tenants to form an organization (SETIO) to collectively pursue their goals.  In the process of pursuing these goals, it becomes to clear to the tenants that the best they can hope for under Housing First policies is temporary relief.  The article goes on to describe the eventual dissolution of the tenants group and follows up with one former beneficiary who is now homeless, whose primary takeaway is "none of this ever stops because nobody ever does anything about it."  If the failure of half-measures like Houston's housing policy causes people to organize against and/or personally reject the status quo, perhaps the half-measure is actually doing the work of building public support for the alternative to landlordism.  Making the "scurrilous plot" reading not just wrong, but literally the opposite of the article's implication.

"policy victories that benefit marginalized people"

It's very clear that there are indeed some victories that Houston's housing policy can claim.  But by presupposing this to be the case, Resnikoff misses the whole point of the article.  The author never claims there are no victories, but rather that the victories are fleeting and limited:

"With cities across the country turning to Houston for answers to “solve” their respective homelessness crises, it’s worth bringing to the fore how Houston’s crisis perpetuates itself on several fronts. Just give people housing has become an inescapable slogan among housing justice advocates. It’s undeniable in its simplicity — everyone deserves housing, after all — and this is where Houston’s program often excels. But how and where people get housing, and for how long, are equally important questions without the same consensus, and are facing escalating attacks from the Right."

And given how the article explicitly lists the failures associated with the program, including:

"One tenant told Jacobin he lived with broken plumbing for two years, with mold blooming on the walls; he didn’t report it for fear of retaliation — that is, until he was hospitalized, at which point his home was officially deemed “uninhabitable.”" 

"they also faced a slew of illegal eviction tactics, including repeated electricity and water shutoffs." 

"one Houston landlord admitted to using his dogs to forcibly evict his low-income tenants" 

...then it's very odd to frame the program as an unqualified "policy victory."  Again, it seems that Resnikoff is making an idealistic and/or ideological argument while simultaneously ascribing such an approach to an author that very explicitly did not do that. 

"enthusiastic market rate landlord participation as evidence of the program's sinister intent"

Much like Resnikoff's other arguments, the "sinister intent" mentioned here fundamentally misrepresents the author's argument.  Specifically, the usage of "sinister" suggests a moralizing tone that the author seems to purposefully avoid.  Sure, the article contains words like "profit-hungry," but those turns of phrases are generally (always?) used as reasonable, matter-of-fact descriptors of specific behavior.  And the author goes so far as to paint the staff of the program as "well-meaning," ascribing little to no blame for tenants' plight on the program itself:

"CFTH does not have any control over the private housing market. It is, fundamentally, at the whim of landlords. With the backing of CFTH, “problem” tenants in effect have a guarantor, someone who picks up the bill if the tenant falls through, but CFTH also acts as the mediator: an entity tenants and landlords look to for support in times of conflict. From this managerial role, whose side would you choose: the isolated tenant, or the so-called housing provider who maintains the power to reject all future applicants, making your job that much harder?"

"the primary goal of ending homelessness"

In short, it seems odd for Resnikoff to state this as the primary goal of the program, given the approach and the contents of the article he shared.  Per the previous paragraph, the program did not and can not end homelessness because it is not empowered to do so!  As such, something as ambitious as "ending homelessness" cannot be its primary goal!  In fact, the article itself explicitly states this:

"CFTH and other similar programs nationwide attempt to combine antithetical views on housing. As bipartisan “common sense” dissolves and more punitive policies take hold, what remains of Housing First is a buffer against more holistic measures aimed at freezing the violent churn of the housing market. SETIO’s story is instructive not only for tenants in Houston, or for others in the South who likely also lack the nominally stronger tenant protections held in New York or Los Angeles, but for those across the country who see Housing First policies as a catchall for combating displacement. With homelessness policy hinging on what the Supreme Court decides this summer, the future may look something like Houston, which blurs the feel-good guise of the technocrat with the unyielding presence of the police. Combined, these two forces continually disperse Houston’s homeless population, a shell game with tenants moving from place to place, courtroom to courtroom, and few chances for long-lasting relief."

What this illustrates for our larger topic of General YIMBY Studies is that not only are the "animating principles" wildly different between folks like Resnikoff and the tenant organizers described in the article, but so are their approaches.  Resnikoff seems content to offer high-minded rhetoric that overlooks the details, while tenant organizers have no choice but to engage with the reality on the ground.  In this way the "fundamental commitments" of the two groups are not just materially different, but are also directly derived from those material differences.  Put another way, there are no YIMBYs in a foxhole.

Thursday, January 2, 2025

2025 Book List

1. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy - Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (link)

"Every business wants to be economically irreplaceable. Few want to be so irreplaceable that their factories might be blown up in a preemptive strike."

Underground Empire serves as a welcome complement to Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire, explicitly addressing the whole economic part of the equation that the latter largely ignored.  It also bolsters Slobodian's narrative in Globalists in showing how the functional goal of US hegemony was (and is) to make foreign governments as subservient to global finance as possible.  Farrell and Newman are a bit overly credulous towards their subject, regularly asserting that the global order it describes was not purposefully constructed, but rather weaponized by powerful forces after the fact.  While this is somewhat true, and while much of their narrative does support this idea, their facile conclusion (best summarized as "let's let liberalism solve the problems that liberalism has created") and many tossed-off assertions (my favorite: "The United States was sometimes unpredictable, but it at least had the rule of law. There wasn't any law strong enough to stop the Chinese government from grabbing hold of whatever it felt it needed.") suggest a fundamental disconnect between the plain reality of American dominance they convey and the necessary prescriptions any mildly attentive reader might derive to counter it.  Regardless of these shortcomings, there's more than enough useful information (the details of Trump's rejection of the JCPOA reads as the same zero-sum game that produced Maidan) and valid theorizing (ie. sanction's primary functional outcome is the chilling effect they create) to make this a worthwhile read.

Farrell and Newman's narrative is centered on the idea of international finance as once having been a "terra nullis" that the US came to dominate.  Numerous factors helped contribute to the construction of the current ruling order, from the prioritization of American "intellectual capital" in response to offshoring/Chinese manufacturing prowess, to the inverted post-9/11 regulatory focus on shutting off capital flows that were once actively encouraged to be open (but heavily monitored, of course).  In building this behemoth, the US became able to unilaterally bend multi-national corporations to their will, turning massive conglomerates like HSBC into what are effectively cooperating witnesses.  Even more, this jurisdiction expanded beyond simple matters of dollars and finance to any "foreign-based technology companies that significantly touched US intellectual property, even indirectly."  Indeed, this strategy of dominance is how the US was able to bring potential counter-hegemonic forces like Huawei and TSMC to heel.  While such malign centralized power is suboptimal for all the obvious reasons, Farrell and Newman's suggest an additional theory (one in keeping with their credulousness towards capitalism): that the accumulation of "process knowledge" stored in such companies is being suppressed and limited to everyone's detriment.

The penultimate chapter where this theory of knowledge is put forth is the most useful of the book.  The conflict at stake is depicted as one of dueling sovereignty: "the rights of the constituents who elected Europe's and America's governments overlapped with their needs as customers of cloud services."  In staking out their sovereign claims, multinational entities like Microsoft paint themselves as a "digital Switzerland," where apparent humanitarian goals (ie. no cyber-attacks against civilians) simultaneously served such companies' bottom lines.  While such an orientation might be admirable and/or useful in some contexts, the book clearly shows that such an idea is not tenable in modern geopolitics.  When the US government demanded fealty upon the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Microsoft (among others) was more than happy to comply.  And when the US demanded that TSMC hand over sensitive information to maintain its access to American markets, it dutifully complied.  As such, it does not appear that any meaningful corporate sovereignty is possible over the long term, which is both heartening (corporations are bad) and frightening (the alternative is somehow worse). 

2. Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal - Eric Rauchway (link)

A somewhat interesting narrative that has little apparent reason to exist.  The story of FDR's pending re-election absolutely can and should be told as the hinge point upon which modern polarization took root.  But while one certainly can (and should) read this book in such a manner, Rauchway is overly coy with what meaning he wants the reader to derive from his work.  To this end, he concludes his introduction as such: "The conflict between [FDR and Hoover], and the traditions of liberalism and conservatism they established, remain central to US politics today." Well, yeah.  The likely reason for this book's relative shallowness is that most of the source material is derived from the diaries and journals of the major players in the transition process, which, while revelatory in their own right, clearly lacks some heft compared to the political sea change implied by the narrative.

The most interesting thread from the book concerns just how batshit insane Hoover was—Rauchway essentially casts him as a Goldwater before Goldwater.  Hoover claimed that FDR's public works proposals would "crack the timbers of our Constitution," adding that "Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die."  He channeled his inner Ben Shapiro, claiming he was "fighting that the wrong course may not be adopted, not by appeal to destructive emotion, but by truth and logic."  His appeal to the electorate comes right out of the David Shor playbook, as his speeches "were largely statistical, the theme being that the depression was licked and the only thing that could stop the upward movement was the election of Roosevelt."  Rauchway to his credit correctly concludes that "Hooverism became central to Republicanism."  The problem is more that this throughline is treated largely as an afterthought, as noted by the perfunctory handling of Hoover's post-presidential life and the minimal detail on his alliances with titans of industry like Henry Ford.

What's worse is that there is not enough detail on Roosevelt to even garner a similar broad impression of the man.  For all the faults of Katznelson's Fear Itself, that book at least gives us a more complete picture of FDR's modus operandi.  There's a nice section on FDR's logic with respect to farm subsidies (by "restoring purchasing power to the farming half of the country" he sought to "turn a special interest into a common concern") and a good description of how and why he sought to use economic and diplomatic methods for deterrence (military might was insufficient at the time), but other than that the cupboard is fairly bare.

3. Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 - Rick Perlstein (link)

"In the White House, a pro-labor aide wrote President Carter in sorrow, "We are within one vote of defeating the most expensive and powerful lobby ever mounted against a bill in the nation's history," pleasing that one last concerted push was not too much to ask to honor this "unusual opportunity to show our commitment to labor." But Carter's commitment to labor was never particularly strong in the first place. And 97 percent of White House mail now opposed the bill. He chose to sit on his hands."

-Perlstein, describing the failure of Labor Reform

"Die."

-Bill Winpisinger of the Machinists Union, when asked what Jimmy Carter could do to redeem himself

I took the joint occasion of Carter's death and the onset of the twelfth consecutive Reagan administration to read Perlstein's final book in this series, and hoo boy did it hit hard.  There's a lot here, obviously, so let's tackle this one with some bullet points.

  • The most clear throughline in Perlstein's narrative is how the political conditions of the Carter era created a sort of anti-politics that lives with us to this day.  On the right, "conservatism" as it was previously known was eschewed for a myopic focus on "organizing discontent," which replaced what is generally understood as "politics" with a seemingly unending race to the bottom.  This left all meaningfully contested political terrain to the Democrats, which led to the 1980 election featuring perhaps the most incongruous platform in history—one that tried to balance the varying wings of the party by promising both increased spending and a balanced budget.  How this half of the political spectrum became dominated by its right-wing is beyond the purview of this book, but if you pay close attention you can still garner how the "quiet strength" approach of the national security apparatus led the way, focusing on America's imperial interests above all else.  Nothing is more illustrative of this imperial drift as Carter's qualifications around it's pursuit of "human rights," which were explicitly described as subject to "fundamental US interests with respect to the nation in question."
  • Within the political struggle in the Democratic Party, the pull quotes above tell you pretty much all you need to know about how things went for labor during Carter's administration. But regardless of Carter's intransigency, Perlstein's narrative makes it clear that the "boardroom Jacobins" were never going to budge, even though the prevailing political winds would favor them no matter what scraps they threw at workers.  This serves as perhaps the most stark lesson that a conciliatory stance towards capital is fundamentally a dead-end.  Carter's own labor secretary said it best: "We have the only labor movement in the world that embraces capitalism. [The business community] is trying to kill it."
  • Also re: the Dems, it's very "fun" to see the Joe Biden we all know and love pop up at various points throughout the narrative, acting as a sort of ghost of presidents future.  Perhaps the most mind-bending excerpt is his stance on a full employment bill, which he opposed because of the "limited, finite ability government has to deal with people's problems."  How inspiring.
  • As for the Republican side of things, Reaganland functions as a continuation of the story of Reagan's rise, begun in earnest in The Invisible Bridge.  What is most noteworthy about Perlstein's narrative here is how Reagan appears as a conduit of the American Dream; free to forget and subsequently live in timeless innocence.  Perlstein remarks on his "capacity to cleanse any hint of doubt regarding American innocence, [which] was the soul of his political appeal: his liturgy of absolution." He quotes Reagan describing America as "unimpressed by what others say is impossible [...] generous, and naive." And after his election, a speech in Texas sums up the Reagan ethos as clearly as ever:
"What is it that we as Americans really want? It isn't power. If we only wanted power, we long ago could have dominated the world. It isn't world leadership as an end in itself; we've had world leadership thrust upon us by events. We've never pursued it. In my view, what we want is so simple...We want to live in freedom, and in peace."
  • I've remarked on mushy liberal critiques of Ralph Nader before, so I'd be remiss to give Perlstein a pass for his own dishonest framing of Nader's actions.  In the section on the failure to pass a bill establishing a consumer-focused agency, does a similar two-step, where he fully understands the structural forces that led to the bill's failure and yet takes time to blame Nader anyway.  Specifically, he describes Nader's efforts to hector Democratic representatives who switched their vote as "hubris," which is especially odd in the middle of a narrative depicting Carter as a failure in large part because he refused to take such measures.
  • Lest you think that Perlstein is a complete liberal hack, he does manage to do pretty good material analysis at times.  In particular, this background to late-seventies feminism is a good summary of the conditions that birthed it:

"The background to this ideological clash was a society whose presumptions about gender and the family were turning upside down-objectively so. It wasn't just the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. It was economic. Between the end of World War Il and the oil shocks of 1973, the real income of ordinary American working families approximately doubled -then, it flatlined or even declined. The change came so suddenly, and felt so foreign to Americans' received way of knowing the world, that it could hardly be perceived whole. It registered, instead, as millions of uncoordinated individual family decisions, in response to millions of individual family struggles keeping up with mortgage payments, car payments, tuition, grocery bills, and the rising price of everything: so Mom began working outside the home. At the height of World War II, only 26 percent of married women worked. By 1977, about half did-including half of women with children under eighteen.  

 Another aspect of the ordeal was built into American public policy. Whereas other industrialized nations built robust state institutions to protect citizens in times of economic stress, in laissez-faire America the task of care was mostly allotted to individual families- which is to say, wives and mothers. A housewife did not directly earn Social Security from the government, or health insurance from an employer. So if she left her husband, or if he left her, she lost both."

4. Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought - Bruno Leipold (link)

"For, as long as Marx had been combating the social ideal of republicanism, he had also been struggling against socialists who rejected the republican insistence on the need for politics. Marx thus continued to fight a struggle on two fronts: using his republican communism to critique both anticommunist republicanisms and antipolitical socialisms."

A bitter irony of perceiving Marx's focus on class struggle as "reductive" is that Marx's own words often directly contradict these supposed deficiencies.  The very nature of such critiques is then self-defeating: while Marx may not have had the answer to everything (an impossible goal), he sure had the answer to a lot.  In this vein, Citizen Marx is a necessary corrective on one of the most important such ideological fronts: that Marx's views were not opposed to republican/democratic thought, but rather built on top of such a framework.  Leipold's dual focus on both the development of Marx's positions through time (advancing his thought on the utility of bourgeois democracy as events transpired) and the constants that guided him throughout (ie. a fundamental opposition to arbitrary power) make for a wonderfully dialectical journey through a dense and expansive corpus.

As you might expect from a broad survey of Marx, this book touches on a number of recurring themes of this blog.  Marx' central focus on "freedom" is not just interesting because it dispels the common perception of communism as simple "equality," but also because it doesn't rest on the frankly tiresome freedom from/freedom to dichotomy.  Rather, Marx's conception of freedom as nondomination is pulled directly from Republican thought, where "it is domination and not interference that compromises liberty," which in turn allows one to view "each person's relation to other people as the realization rather than a barrier to his freedom."  What's more is that one's unfreedom under capitalism is obscured by its very nature; the seeming freedom to choose which capitalist you labor for belies the simple fact that you must work for a capitalist.  In turn, the domination that marks this unfreedom is reinforced by a disciplining market that forces capitalists to "continuously expand his capital in order to keep it."  This mechanism immiserates us all as it "prevent[s] society from freely deciding how to make use of the immense gains of productivity."

Marx's concept of capital-d democracy is also fascinating.  Obviously, he and Engels changed their precise position on the utility of liberal democracy over time, but I found his theory regarding true democracy to be more useful.  Specifically, his definition of such a concept as "a state in which the modern divide between the political sphere and civil society has been overcome."  Indeed, it was the split between the two spheres (originating in the French Revolution) which "did not truly free people from obstacles to their freedom, [but] only relegated those obstacles to civil society."  Furthermore, in a true democracy, Marx viewed participating in the administration of such a government as an "essential, intrinsic aspect of our being" where civic knowledge flows from such participation rather than into it (through, say, a citizenship exam).  Marx also touches on my old watchword of "complexity" in this discussion, as his praise for Athenian democracy is tempered in practice by the inherent inability to apply concepts such as direct democracy to a modern society.  At the same time, Marx understands that complicated constitutional designs (ie. the checks and balances of the Federalists) are a deliberate ploy to thwart democratic will.  The way to square these two views on "complexity" is that such complications are only "good" (or perhaps, useful) if they arise organically, and reflect a verifiable reality.

Finally, it's important to understand the practical differences between republicanism and Marx's theory of communism, if only to guard against common misconceptions.  Republican advocacy for an individual right to property certainly sounds liberatory, but the contrast with the Marxist stance of abolition of private property makes it clear that social reforms regarded as explicit goals rather than as means towards a greater end cannot be meaningfully liberatory.  I was also struck by Engels' correct understanding of communism not as dogma, but as the natural conclusion of earnestly pursuing scientific inquiry, which helpfully reinforces my own struggles with modern reformist thought:

"Engels consequently charges Heinzen with misunderstanding communism as if it were a doctrine...[that] proceeds from a definite theoretical principle" (i.e., the principle of the abolition of private property) in order to then analyze and judge the world. Rather, communism, in Engels's presentation, begins with an analysis of the "course of previous history" and the "actual results in the civilized countries at the present time," and from there makes predictions about the necessity of communism."

5. Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America - Erik Baker (link)

"The idea that creating work, for oneself and for others, was not just feasible for any given individual but an expression of a person's unique talents and creative potential neatly resolved the contradiction between the imperative to work under capitalism and the scarcity of work created by its advanced corporate form. If the entrepreneurial work ethic did not exist, it would have been necessary to create it."

"To be entrepreneurial is, at least potentially, not to be industrious, to substitute one's own personality and creativity for the yoke of tradition or bureaucracy. To make your own job is to refuse the job another might seek to impose on you. In this way, the entrepreneurial work ethic mirrors capitalism itself, which makes work the measure of all things at the same time that it makes it scarce, systematically producing surplus populations separated from work entirely. Capitalism is constantly creating and destroying work. One important reason why the entrepreneurial work ethic has proven so durable is that is has the flexibility to glorify both prongs of this contradictory movement—to cheer on the creation of new jobs, businesses, products, and industries, while also urging the demolition of all the sclerotic, soul-crushing, bureaucratic work that afflicts us today."

Make Your Own Job is the history of an idea promulgated almost exclusively by charlatans.  This makes reading seemingly endless passages about the entrepreneurial spirit far less engaging than say, reading a history of neoliberal thought.  While guys like Hayek may have been charlatans in their own right, they still attempted some level of intellectual rigor that is worthy of sparring with.  And yet, I still found this book to be worth my time because the endless vapidity of the self-help set served a purpose of showing the utter foolishness of viewing work as an self-driven enterprise.  Throughout the century-plus depicted in Baker's narrative, the idea of entrepreneurialism is shown to be a constant glorification of the individual that simultaneously serves to make business leaders appear as singular geniuses and to dash all hopes of working towards collective goals.

Lest I lead you to believe the book is 260 pages of pure puffery, Baker does a good job interspersing the ideological and technical developments that helped situate the idea of entrepreneurship in our society.  The transition from the idea of industriousness, rooted in the republican ideals of the independent producer, came about not because of persuasion but because of technological advances that rendered the abundant labor of early capitalism moot.  While capital was happy to comply with these historical developments for obvious economic reasons (ie. labor-saving technologies were also capital-saving), the path for others was more circuitous.  Thinkers like Frederick Winslow Taylor implicitly denied the growing power of capital by pushing technocratic improvements as a panacea, while many workers turned towards the ideas of New Thought, which promised individuals a connection with a "reservoir of infinite cosmic energy."  Ultimately, none of these took hold as hegemonic ideals, as entrepreneurialism was just too aligned with the wishes of capital to lose out.

Once the "Make Your Own Job" ethos takes hold, the ideology underpinning American capitalism becomes a series of funhouse mirrors.  Basic observations about humanity like "human satisfaction depends on activities pursued in common and directed towards some future achievement or purpose" become twisted to support individual initiative.  The very idea of "success" became both tautological and immaterial: "The right attitude led to success because true success, as [Norman Vincent Peale] understood it, just was having the right attitude."  The concept of democracy was turned inward, and was seen as "not so much a system of government...but a dynamic process, something that was done by individuals equipped with a particular set of psychological virtues."  The dreaded idea of "authoritarianism" was also turned on its head, as Erich Fromm defined it as "the tendency to give up the independence of one's own individual self and to fuse one's self with somebody or something outside oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking."  Baker's narrative is not overly deterministic about where all this leads us (other than to make the obvious point that the market enforces this entrepreneurial discipline), but it is interesting to see how the closing chapters depict a failing center, looking towards austerity, fewer regulations, and lower taxes with the hope of propping up an entrepreneurial ideal long past its expiration date.

6. ¡No Pasarán! Matt Christman's Spanish Civil War - Matt Christman

"Obedience grants a reward of eternal love and happiness in heaven. A heaven that rational inquiry and the collective breakthroughs of modern science showed was fraudulent. But the love that heaven represented, the sacred presence that suffused the experience of the village and family life, the laughter in the face of suffering, had been real, was real, and could be made real again."

Our big, beautiful boy delivers a delightful crackpot summary of the Spanish Civil War that touches on all the thematic points you could possibly want.  Rebellions like the Asturias Rising showed how the center would not, and could not hold.  The uprising being led by generals with experience in Morocco (most notably, Franco) is a classic example of colonialism coming home to roost.  The differing goals of the anarchists (social revolution) and the communists (adherence to the Soviet-backed Popular Front) paints a typical story of leftist infighting.  And the failure of the Labor Charter put in place by the Nationalists to deliver on its supposed promises to workers is yet another demonstration of the perfidy of fascists.

7. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life - Theodore M. Porter (link)

"Corps measures were actually conservative, because "there were so many indirect and intangible things that you cannot evaluate by what I call the invoice methods." He also acknowledged that "no two men in this room" would agree on how to value property, and that while assessed valuation is taken into account, it is not decisive. [Representative] Clason was troubled: "If voters write into me to ask me on what basis they build a dike, I would like to be able to tell them something more definitive than guess at the increase in the value of the property." "I would not say it is a guess," [Chief Army Engineer] McCoach replied, "it is an estimate.""

An interesting look into the epistemic debate and subsequent policy developments around the idea of scientific "objectivity" that suffers slightly for its minimization of the power dynamics involved in such a process.  Porter's general credulousness towards elite scientists' arguments that what they do is too specialized and complex to be subject to the judgment of the masses is fine in one sense.  After all, the arguments are often convincing and are probably "true," to some degree at least.  But aside from a few wickedly obvious quips (see the pull quote above), it's difficult to know from the evidence provided in the book just how full of shit advocates of a perpetual ivory tower were.

Regardless of this mild shortcoming, Porter makes it clear that the pressure to quantify and standardize scientific output came from both outside and inside the academy.  What's more is that this impetus arose on several different fronts.  In education, standardization was needed to "train the mind to an exact and impartial analysis of facts" in order to "provide the best possible moral instruction" and "promote sound citizenship."  Quantification helped to create a mass culture that, among other things, helped to enable greater equality through numbers-based programs like Affirmative Action.  Statistics were thought to promote democracy by creating a "thoroughly public knowledge."  Fields of study like economics were seen by governments as "shared property of educated generalists" which required a common language of mathematics to properly parse.  Statistical rigor was seen as the antidote to the seeming arbitrariness of elites, which could only be countered by a "regime of public knowledge."  This broad picture of the forces that shaped this journey make it difficult to draw any simple conclusions as to the ultimate net benefit of objectification, which is perhaps the point.

The theme Porter uses to tie all of this together is one of trust.  The global scope of modernity implicitly forgoes the interpersonal trust possible in smaller communities, but does not eliminate the fundamental need for the baseline of trust that allows a society to function.  Because "economic concentration meant that people could no longer look their trading partners in the eye," we now "depend even more on faith in impersonal technological and regulatory mechanisms."  Put more starkly, "mechanical objectivity serves as an alternative to personal trust."  This is demonstrated most clearly in a discipline one wouldn't necessarily expect, actuarial science: "The government sought public knowledge, while the actuaries denied its possibility. The government sought a foundation for faith in numbers, while the actuaries demanded trust in their judgment as gentlemen and professionals."  It's to this book's slight detriment that even an extreme skeptic such as myself can't fully take a side in the conflict presented here.  But maybe Porter's ambivalence in his updated preface for the 2020 version of this book (originally published in 1995) hints at something of an inherently unsolvable problem.  As he mentions both "radical distrust of people and institutions" and "subtle reasoning [being] devalued for the sake of administrative convenience," he reiterates that relying on numbers is always a way to avoid the messy business of politics.  Perhaps then, the solution to this problem is not anything simple but rather the same thing that would address any of our anti-political impulses: mass politics for the masses.

8. Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science - Audra J. Wolfe (link)

"It was only when I got deeper into the archival and declassified records that I understood how far a distinction between overt, covert, and private propaganda activities missed the mark. [Scientists] saw no conflict in accepting any kind of US government funds to promote their version of scientific freedom, so long as they retained direct control over the message being disseminated. Put another way, these scientists' belief in their autonomy as scientists—their commitment to scientific freedom—limited their ability to recognize that their ideas were being put to use in campaigns over which they had no control."

A welcome addition to my favorite genre, Freedom's Laboratory combines the precision of The Mighty Wurlitzer with the sweeping scope of The Cultural Cold War.  Wolfe's investigation of science, writ large, is not as in-depth as the subject of Cold War Anthropology, but that is largely because the discipline was never quite as aligned with the needs of American empire (see the early chapters about the fitful starts and restarts of early Cold War science organizations where no one was really sure of the ultimate purpose).  And because it's fresh in my mind, Wolfe's more tangential treatment of "objectivity" is somehow more enlightening than Porter's more direct examination of the matter, in large part because Wolfe understands and more clearly communicates the power dynamics at play.  In all, Wolfe's narrative serves to depict the fecklessness of the pursuit of "objectivity" in science that, like with modern journalists, is ultimately self-defeating.

Wolfe is at her strongest in the parts that emphasize how this fuzzy ideology worked to America's advantage.  Her critique of the USIA's 1958 statement (containing gems like "Science is neither for nor against, moral nor immoral. It is apolitical.") becomes more incisive when accompanied by the context that US scientists were pessimistic about their ability to compete with Soviet technology.  In this way, appeals to an ideal of "science" standing outside of political reality became a way to negate this deficit by laundering American ideology to a wide swath of people.  Diagnosing this maneuver as such is not just paranoia; indeed, it was made explicit at times, such as in a secret report from PSAC:

"The "objective nature of science and scientific research—its independence of political belief" made science the perfect olive branch to both Communist block scientists and ambitious leaders in newly independent countries."

What gave additional purchase to this approach was that it rang true, even for some radicals and communist sympathizers, in the specific context of nuclear proliferation.  One of the book's most revealing chapters concerns the rise and fall of the Pugwash Conferences, which were specifically focused on non-proliferation and other similar counters to global annihilation.  By examining the output of this group, it's easy to understand how an earnest commitment to humanism and/or pacifism could inadvertently support the foreign policy goals of the biggest warmonger of them all.  Take this passage describing Bertrand Russell's manifesto:

""We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt." He asked his listeners to "set aside" political commitments to capitalism or communism and instead focus on their identities as "members of a biological species...whose disappearance none of sus can desire." Russell posed the problem starkly. "shall we put and end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?""

Wolfe brings this home by showing how these efforts at scientific diplomacy ultimately led to Soviet dissidents weaponizing similar arguments in support of revanchist political projects. "Refuseniks" like Andrei Sakharov, per Wolfe, marshalled "attitudes about scientific freedom that circulated as part of the US ideological offensive during the Cold War." Sakharov specifically "saw a convergence between capitalism and socialism, driven more by a benign technocracy than by democracy, in which a science freed from the demands of politics could meet all the needs of the people."  That creating and nurturing of this sort of vocabulary of opposition helped America win the Cold War is fairly obvious—Wolfe says as much in the closing pages.  But a deeper reading enabled by her narrative reveals not only the hollowness of such an ideology, but also the way that American capital engineered and enabled such dissent to poke away at the growing fissures in Soviet society.

I do want to briefly acknowledge that there is a small irony that a) the author herself participated in similar diplomatic efforts under the Obama administration, and b) she doesn't seem to fully grasp the true nature of Soviet scientific inquiry (ie. her discussion of Lysenko alludes to a "dogmatism" that she never really unpacks or explains).  So while her book is a very useful depiction of how American scientific diplomacy worked in the Cold War, her own actions and unexamined ideological assumptions are a wonderful demonstration of how similar forces still exert themselves to this day.

9. The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform - Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian (link)

One of those books that sneakily makes you dumber because it doesn't seem to even conceive of its own contradictions.  The argument that the reforms of Deng Xiaoping have their roots in the Cultural Revolution is reasonable and logical (perhaps even obvious), but the authors' combination of focus on leadership and vitriol towards radical change serve to undermine this at every step.  Take this passage from the conclusion:

"A main argument in this book is that the revolution from below did more to change China than any orders issued by the CCP. China was transformed by the millions of Chinese who took their fate in their own hands, working for a better life. The fact that many did so before economic reform was declared at the central level shows where the great transformation originated."

Again, this seems reasonable enough, but considering that the majority of the previous 300 pages talks about palace intrigue and the like, the conclusion doesn't quite follow.  What's weirder still is that the authors go on to decry Dengism as leading to "harsher values" and an "emphasis on material gain."  Once again this seems true enough, but it seems very odd to draw that conclusion after repeatedly decrying the bottom-up effort to counter such an ideological drift as "excessive."  Ultimately, this is a book that comprehends the idea of political struggle, but does not seem to view the left-wing elements of the proletariat and/or peasantry as a valid political force.

10. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation - Eyal Weizman (link)

"From the perspective of those opposing it, the 'elastic' nature of the Wall is thus simultaneously empowering and frustrating. It is empowering because bringing pressure to bear on the route, in protests and court petitions, has been demonstrated to alleviate conditions on the ground, and further pressure may be effective in pushing the Wall further westwards, closer to the international border of the Green Line and making marginally more tolerable the lives of Palestinians who are suffocating under the weight of its regime. However, the principle of 'elasticity' is also frustrating because it demonstrates that any action directed against the Wall's route, rather than against its very concept, presence and essence (the approach the ICJ has taken), not only legitimizes it and confirms it as a fact, but effectively takes part in its making — the frontier continually remoulds itself to absorb and accommodate opposition, which gradually becomes part of its discourse and contributes to its efficiency. Oppositional action has therefore played a part in the collective, albeit diffused, authorship of the architecture of the Wall."

A towering work of genius that channels its righteous fury into a necessary mission.  That mission, exposing the many built layers of the occupation of Palestine, is too broad and fascinating to do proper justice here.  But the pull quote above hints at perhaps its most useful theme: how the "humanitarian paradox" renders negotiation with Israel as a reinforcement of the occupation.  Humanitarian aid is necessary for continued survival but absolves Israel of their obligations under international law.  Acceptance of "lesser evils" such as more "humane" methods of warfare can help extend and normalize low-level conflicts in perpetuity.  False sovereign political bodies like the Palestinian Authority serve to "perpetuate the logic of the one-way mirror" in the security facilities they administrate at the behest of the Israelis behind said mirror.  And quibbles over the nature of the Wall and other such structure of occupation helps deflect from the overall illegitimacy of such measures.  Through this lens, all the complexity (there's that word again) that Israel invokes in these areas serves as a sort of "constructive blurring" where the "facts of domination" are obfuscated and naturalized.  As Weizman puts it succinctly, "chaos has its peculiar structural advantages."

Beyond the ongoing reality of occupied Palestine, Weizman's work speaks to everyone in the world seeking to counter oppression.  The idea of Israel as a "laboratory" for the world is so common in the narrative that you'd almost think that this is where other books got the idea for their title.  The "perceived separation" between the different layers of the occupation is explicitly called out as an "attractive model for other countries that seek some form of population control."  The idea of settlements as surveillance, where the settlers act as a sort of "visible but unverifiable" panopticon, echoes the ideas of social media and the like as a form of self-policing.  And hey I think I have a guess where Trump got his idea to "rebuild" Gaza:

"Mohamed Alabbar, the flamboyant Arab businessman (who is slated to be the equivalent of Donald Trump in the pan-Arab TV show version of The Apprentice), arrived in Israel six months prior to the evacuation, met with Shimon Peres and briefly with Sharon, and offered to buy all the homes and other real estate assets in the settlements of Gush Katif for $56 million. Alabbar is the chairman of Emaar Properties, a gigantic real estate company registered in the United Arab Emirates which has been a central player in the frantic development of Dubai, specializing in rapid construction of themed onshore tourist and residential projects. He imagined Katif as the site for a possible tourist enclave. This resulted in bizarre and grotesque plans for Dubai-style, large high-rise hotel complexes, and settler homes becoming part of a set of tourist villages, on what was now dubbed 'the best beach resort of the Mediterranean'; had they come to fruition, such complexes would no doubt have become extraterritorial enclaves set against the deep poverty that surrounded them. These fantasies never got very far. But, together with other proposals for wholesale privatization, they would have robbed Palestinians of the evacuated public land to which they were entitled, and desperately needed."

11. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming - Andreas Malm (link)

"A traveller along the frontiers of climate change today—not to speak of tomorrow—might encounter a landscape even more thoroughly shaped by humans with power. Weather conditions, types of vegetation. entire biomes, even the sea itself might have fallen into place as a fallout of the combustion of fossil fuels. But where Robbins is able to trace a certain property of the Yellowstone landscape to a specific decision made in the past - the absence of natives to their historical removal — the climate change traveller can, by the nature of things, see no such straight lines. A submerged islet has born the full weight of a history lacking differentiation. No single decision, no emission of one tonne of greenhouse gases can be connected to this particular scene: the burning of this barrel of Texas oil cannot be pinned down as the cause of this Levantine drought. Every impact of anthropogenic climate change carries the imprint of every human act with a radiative forcing, such that they are infinitesimal representatives of two moving aggregates — the aftermath and the source — intimately coupled yet strangely disconnected from each other."

Framed as a rebuttal to the common "Anthropocene" interpretation of climate change as inherent to human development, Andreas Malm's seminal work actually functions better (to me at least) as a more subtle rejoinder to undercurrents of vulgar material analysis.  As renewable energy has become cheaper, refrains that the market will save us have gained more purchase.  While such a smooth transition is hardly impossible, blind faith in such a development belies an understanding of just how our fossil-fueled society came to be.  As Malm tells it, the slow adoption of steam power was more broadly an expression of just that—power.  By detailing the transition from water power to steam in the booming cotton industry of 19th-century Britain, he demonstrates how "capital prevailed over labour in the key industry of British economy by means of power, in the dual sense of the word."  Harkening back to the story of the Luddites, Malm argues that the "very same desire for subordinated human labour that animated automation drove cotton capital toward steam."  Thus, the ultimate driver of the fetishized commodity that portends doom for our species can (and should) be seen as the same, boring old root of every other problem: class struggle.

Malm's discussion of this phenomenon goes deep into every possible angle of the subject matter.  The "fetishization" I mention above is but one part of a deeper metaphysical (and borderline hauntological) rumination on how fossil fuels warp the very nature of time, capturing fuel from the past at the expense of the future.  But the more straightforward history of the transition to steam is probably the most enlightening part, if only for how clearly it paints a picture of capital's domination of labor.  In some places that domination is made explicit (steam powered machines were described by titans of industry as "the most tractable, as well as the most active, laborer we can employ"), but even when capital doesn't say it out loud, Malm's narrative makes it clear that "the [steam] engine was a superior medium for extracting surplus wealth from the working class."  This commodification of labor was helped along by the "mobility in space" of steam-powered machines, which didn't rely on the relatively fixed nature of water power.  

What was most striking, however, was just how anti-human and illogical such an enterprise was.  Yes, I may have been ground down into a cynical husk of capitalist realism at this point, but it still surprises me to read just how lazy British capitalists were above all else.  While they may have followed the primrose path to capital accumulation, such a development was in no way easy or even necessary.  Malm's detailing of the problems of coordination and resource distribution required to implement large-scale water schemes would render me sympathetic to the plight of the British capitalist if not for the fact that peasants the world over figured this out literal centuries earlier, as detailed in this passage on 16th-century Egypt:

"Peasants were tied together in...'communities of water.' They adhered to the physical properties of the liquid's movement, viscosity, and flow rate, and the notion that the welfare of the whole always trumped the interests and desires of the few. This ideal of cooperative and collective responsibility arose from the fact that, throughout the countryside, scores of villages relied on the function of a single set of irrigation features for their entire supply of water—some combination of a canal, a dam, a section of the Nile, a waterwheel, a sluice gate, and other irrigation works. In these hundreds of ecosystems organized around the shared usage of water and irrigation features, the actions of a few directly affected the welfare of the whole community."

12. Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) - Colette Shade (link)

"Good Night Bush found shelf space alongside plenty of other anti-Bush books that came out between the president's inauguration in January 2001 and his departure from office in January 2009. These books promised to expose or criticize or make fun of the president, or presented an expert opinion on his supposedly unique psychology (Bush on the Couch), or proposed slightly less harsh Democratic alternatives to Republican-led policies like the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act and the indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay. In a preview of the Trump Era, the fact that there were so many fake children's books here was supposed to be a kind of commentary on the childishness of Republicans and the fact that Democrats are "the adults in the room." But instead it hints at something developmentally stunted and Freudian—perhaps the desire for a mommy to read you a bedtime story and tuck you in and tell you everything will be okay, because the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Or for a strapping, shirtless daddy in a superhero cape to rescue you from the big, bad orange man. So much of liberal politics amounts to yelling "Mooooom! Daaaaaaad! He's cheating!" But even as a child myself, I could see that no one was coming to save us."

13. Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal - Mohammed El-Kurd (link)

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

More Fun Wrinkles of the Is-Ought Problem

About a year ago I wrote this post clarifying some of my thoughts on the pervasiveness of the is-ought problem in modern discourse.  Specifically, I showed that part of the reason for the relevance of that framework is that neither category represents a strict binary orientation towards one's rhetorical aims, which allows one to consider the "is-ness" and "ought-ness" of any particular claim.  Most of the piece discusses how the "is" half of the equation is routinely abused to advance what are fundamentally conservative arguments, and I conclude by addressing the other half as well:

"After all, saying what ought to happen is not merely a rhetorical device; rather, it's the first step in potentially making that thing happen.  If you instead decide to alchemize your fear into a categorical imperative that effectively forbids any demands of those in power then you have implicitly, if not explicitly, accepted defeat."

By addressing this problem dialectically, I allow for one to, in good faith, apply multiple interpretations of any seemingly pragmatic argument against progressive change.  Is such an approach overly generous towards some pundits we know to be undeserving of this good faith?  Yes!  But is it also useful to consider some of their arguments through this framework, so as to better understand our own positions and arguments?  Also yes!  Why don't we do this together!


Friend of the blog Eric Levitz provides a helpful demonstration of how one can over-index the "ought-ness" of an argument.  Buried in that chain of screenshots is the metrics for Ken's post where he published the "manifesto" in question.  Ken is clearly arguing that the incredibly high demand for this information indicates a meaningful public interest for that item.  It does not necessarily claim that either a) any popular post indicates a legitimate public interest, or b) there are not other considerations for what might constitute the public interest.  Indeed, Ken's refusal to publish the fake manifesto is an implicit demonstration that he likely does not believe either of these claims.  And yet, Levitz appears to assume that Ken's specific claim that releasing the manifesto is in the public interest is actually a far more universal claim.  



Other friend of the blog Yair Rosenberg commits a very similar error to Levitz here, assuming that some level of tacit endorsement of a specific act of violence is equivalent to a categorical approval of all vigilante justice and/or all violence, period.  This paternalistic exaggeration of the "ought-ness" of the situation is easily countered by repeated demonstrations of this exact type of concern in similar situations.  Furthermore, Rosenberg appears to make a faulty assumption about the "is-ness" of political violence in our society.  Indeed, if he were to "crack open a history book" on the subject of American healthcare, he might find that the capital class purposely imposes violence on the masses in search of increased profits.  Perhaps it is this shallow understanding of reality that leads him to misunderstand the normative values of others who do not share his ignorance.

In short, the framing of the is-ought problem suggests a rigid dichotomy, but category errors within either side of the problem can support and reinforce incomplete understandings of not just others' positions, but of reality itself.

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Top TV of 2024

A common refrain among the masses is that TV is not as good as it was during the "Golden Age."  A ongoing rewatch of The Sopranos has helped me to partially confirm this, albeit with an important clarification.  Yes, we are absolutely past the era where a particularly incorrigible set of auteurs created a pantheon of series that commanded the television viewing public's attention.  The craft, the uniqueness, the weight and importance, and most importantly, the television-ness of these series is not something that is likely to be replicated soon if ever again.  But I do think it's a mistake to write off television as a medium.  Even if the centrality of "Prestige TV" is long gone, the same artistic impulse and shared pursuit of television is still present, and in far more dimensions than it used to be.  You just might have to do a little more work yourself to find what is both best and best for you.  But if you do that as I have done, you might find it to be as rewarding as before, just in a different way.  Here is the result of my "work" for 2024.

#7 (tie) - Pachinko (Apple TV+), The Bear (Hulu)

My new strategy of only ranking the best of the best means I don't know quite what to do with slightly lesser seasons of great shows.  One on hand, I left the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building off the list entirely as it somehow got too episodic (it turns out that wrapping up each week's red herring within the span of thirty minutes makes the work as a whole kinda shallow).  On the other hand, Pachinko is too great to leave off the list entirely, even if the second season dragged a bit compared to the first.  While the 1989 plot lacked the intrigue of the first season and the earlier storyline flattened out some of its characters, the bones of a great program are still there.  Anytime a show manages to echo the quiet contemplation of others' perspectives of Rectify and the subtle nods to the spiritual/supernatural realm of Twin Peaks, it's probably worth sticking it out.

Same goes for The Bear, which partially collapsed under the weight of its expectations.  Excepting the brilliant premiere (the best 25-minute Nine Inch Nails music video you'll ever see) and the midseason highlight "Napkins," this season was something of a watered-down version of both the breezy nature of the first two seasons and the aura of "prestige" that Christopher Storer and friends seem enamored with.  This aspiration to be something different than the successful thing that it is hurts the show in other ways, as well.  I've remarked in previous year-end lists how The Bear echoes the thematic nature of Whiplash.  This was one of the primary reasons for the show's greatness (and still is!), but the structural problems I mentioned serve to crowd this out, sometimes explicitly.  When Carmi confronts Joel McHale's chef from hell in the finale, it's all just...spelled out, rather inartfully, in their brief conversation!  The chef is not a real, developed character like virtually everyone else in the show, but rather a cartoon villain taking the form of Carmi's insecurities and regrets.  This could (and does!) work if he merely remained a spectral force in Carmi's psyche, but his incarnation in the present world of The Bear belies how the show's creators don't seem to understand the limitations of its approach.

#6 - Sugar (Apple TV+)

Shows built around a narrative twist often don't work.  Sugar, home to the most notable twist of the year, does work.  Perhaps having the twist happen at the end of the sixth episode (of eight) and having it be something fairly obvious to anyone paying attention is a way to tell the viewer not to care that much about it.  Or, going a step further, if a twist is just a normal part of the proceedings, is it even a "twist"?  Either way, if we allow ourselves to free our minds from second-guessing the plot mechanics of the show, then perhaps we can understand just how critical they are to making Sugar what it is.  Indeed, orienting the whole show around (spoilers, kinda) Sugar's foreign understanding of humanity is one of the few postmodern approaches to storytelling that actually worked for me.  After all, we all perceive and interpret reality through our memories of movies and television, at least to some degree.  Creating a character who can only do that enables a worthwhile reflection on the push and pull of that phenomenon.

UNRANKED - The Curse (Showtime)

On one hand, The Curse is often slow and repetitive, engages in the gawking nature it seemingly exists to repudiate, and almost seems antithetical to the televisual form.  On the other hand, it features one of the performances of the year in any medium (Emma Stone), employs a wonderfully unique and fitting score, and absolutely nails the landing.  And perhaps the "weaknesses" I listed above are actually its strengths, making it above all a commentary on the nature on entertainment and art.  This push and pull made me think much more about the nature of evaluating whether or not the thing was good than about the thing itself, which I suppose is an accomplishment worthy of a unique praise.  As such, congrats to Nathan Fielder and friends for creating the first show that I simultaneously rank and do not rank in my year-end list.

#5 - Shogun (FX)

Thesis: A great drama like Shogun is great because it demands that we withhold judgment and observe another way of being, another set of values.

Antithesis: Even when we do this as authentically as possible, it's revealed that much is fundamentally the same.  Pride, honor, humility, and the like are all universal features of humanity, revealed in myriad ways across infinite contexts.

Synthesis: Perhaps what Shogun ultimately shows us is that The Other is fundamentally unknowable  across all ages and cultures.

Super-Synthesis: Maybe it's just a good television program and everything else flows from that

#4 - Fargo (FX)

A welcome return to form for one of the true delights of late-Golden Age TV.  Basically everything about this season was note-perfect, including the well-earned optimism of the syrup-infused denouement.  But nothing was more Fargo-y than the other prominent scene from the finale, where Jennifer Jason Leigh's capitalist matriarch put Jon Hamm's sheriff character in his place.  Sheriff Tillman served as a wonderful foil throughout the season, putting a comical spin on an all-too-real American story, while still serving the interests of his powerful friends.  But ultimately, the Sheriff's antics were bad for business, so he is sent to prison, where Lorraine is able to turn the screws one last time.  Just a wonderful parable of how the spectacle of the American Id is wielded by the powerful when it's useful and put down when it is not.

#3 - Industry (HBO)

I am struggling to think of another drama whose first season was good and promising, whose second season was something of a struggle, and whose third season was downright transcendent.  Why is Industry that show?  In one sense, it's all about the mechanics of the story.  Ruthlessly stripping out some characters and focusing on one primary storyline (Pierpont's pursuit of the ESG market) helped declutter the proceedings, and allowed enough breathing room to produce the series highlight "White Mischief."  But just as much, the show finally seemed to understand its own strengths, especially when contrasted with its oxygen-sucking influenceIndustry found multiple ways to interrogate its characters' psychology without luxuriating in their excesses or relying on hokey cliches.  In doing this, it's able to avoid the pitfalls of moralizing that other examinations of capitalist excess suffer from, which allows us to really see who the people inside the horrible machine are.

#2 - My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child (HBO) 

There's not much to say about the final installment of an all-timer that I haven't said before.  The story of Lenu's final entanglement with Nino drags at times (in part because her foolishness can no longer be attributed to the naivety of youth) until it suddenly doesn't.  Various storylines are resolved effortlessly with the appropriate level of heft and resonance for each one.  And the central tension between Lenu and Lila remains as resonant as ever, even as it is weaved into the nature of the work itself in the concluding moments.  One thing that especially struck me as I savored the final run was just how novelistic this adaptation is.  Which, well, duh.  But the specific deployment of the voiceover, the way the camera lingers on certain shots as if echoing descriptive passages, and its long and detailed memory all make this show the apotheosis of projecting a beloved work of writing onto the small screen. 

#1 - Ripley (Netflix)

In the past decade of post-Golden Age TV landscape, we've progressed from quaint complaints about treating seasons of television as movies to a funhouse mirror business model, where the demands of profit have shifted the narrative work that used to reside in low-to-mid budget movies to the small screen.  This, plus a reliance on existing IP over new ideas, has created a TV lineup of literal eight-hour movies.  To be fair, some such series are intriguing and/or legitimately good.  The Girlfriend Experience nearly topped my list years ago, and recent entries like Interview with a Vampire and Dead Ringers are worthwhile updates to classic films.  But overall, this trend towards recycling old ideas and fitting round pegs into square holes has been a net negative for the medium.

The success of Ripley, then, is instructive as to how this tendency toward mediocrity can be countered.  Don't just stretch out the story artificially—instead, literally stretch it out.  Take the ethos of a Breaking Bad set piece and apply it in painstaking detail to every detail of Ripley's slow descent into amorality.  Choose a striking visual affect, and use it not only to creating something beautiful in and of itself, but also something that stands in direct contrast to everything else that trades on the cheap luxury of Italian scenery.  Make some small but meaningful changes to the proceedings that upend things without being showy.  And center everything on a set of actors perfectly cast for their roles.  In particular, Andrew Scott's portrayal of the titular character is precisely the right kind of empty: a man who clearly acts with purpose, but a purpose whose true nature can never quite be known.

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Some Brief Thoughts II

I wrote something when Biden triumphed in 2020 primary, so I owe it to myself to write something now that he has presided over a historical collapse of his political project.

1.

I started writing a post in October complaining about Harris' campaign.  I did not end up finishing it because I foolishly believed that her vibes-based, policy-light campaign was going to win regardless of its lack of substance, which would render my complaint somewhat irrelevant.  It turns out that my cynicism, while not itself unearned or incorrect, was still directionally incorrect.  It was instead Trump's fundamental lack of substance that convinced enough people (falsely of course) that he was the answer to the growing discontent of the masses.  As a penance, I have finished this post below.

The common refrain from Democratic-aligned pundits is that the economy is doing well because of Democratic policies, which means you should vote for Harris/et al to let the good times roll.  And yet, voter enthusiasm, especially that of the working class, lags behind this perception.  Why is this?

There's a lot that can be said about this, so I want to keep it relatively simple.  This means I will forgo discussion of higher-level thoughts about what "the economy" really is and if it is actually "doing well," and will instead take the Democrats' word at face value.  This is easy enough to do, as your average wonk will produce plenty of charts and graphs to this effect.  Start with this example:


This sure looks good!  The bottom earners are making more!  But real quick, which do you think is more?  Nine percent of nothing, or 5% of a lot?  The idea that we're not in the midst of a long, slow redistribution of wealth to the wealthy is directly undermined by the very data liberal pundits share to defend their candidate!  Here's another similar example:


In this case, the ~2% difference between wage growth and inflation is indeed good.  It's just that we can see the rest of the chart!  The argument that a year of this trend accomplished anything more than somewhat offsetting the previous surge in inflation is fundamentally an argument to sell you nothing but crumbs.  Put another way, it's effectively a newer, friendlier trickle-down economics that supposes that some mildly positive third-order effects of economic policy are the best the working class can hope for.

Of course not every argument the Democrats put forward is for literal crumbs.  There are some things that are a little bit better, which can be thought of as crumbs+.  One such proposal concerns home care/long-term care for seniors, which has been a long-neglected aspect of our already pretty neglectful healthcare system.  To be clear, this is a very good proposal, and its enactment would be one of the most positive political developments in years.  And yet, I can't help but notice a few things in the details:

  • Innovate and Engage with the Private Sector: This initiative will draw upon best practices across Medicare plans as well as the private sector to expand the home care workforce, partner with technology companies in areas such as remote patient monitoring and telehealth services, as well as other private sector partnerships.

  • Lift Up Care Workers: This initiative will provide care workers access to better wages, improve quality of care for seniors and those with disabilities, and treat our seniors with the dignity they deserve.

Making such a benefit part of Medicare is great, but if all that Medicare money is going to private sector companies with only a weak acknowledgment of the actual labor that goes into home care, then I start to get suspicious of the true aims of this endeavor.  Much like with the ACA, I view this as fundamentally a giveaway to private interests with the ancillary benefit of providing better/cheaper care to some.  Perhaps this sort of bargain really is the best we can hope for, but if you believe this I'd like to ask: which end of this bargain do you think is going to be sacrificed next time there is a recession and/or a Republican-controlled government?

In the end the case Harris is making is that Biden has given us crumbs and she hopes to give us crumbs+.  Has anything really changed from Biden's lethargic campaign?  And even if it has, will it be enough?


2.

Two red-state Democrats (at least) ran Senate campaigns that were not explicitly anti-trans, but did capitulate to right-wing framing on the issue in particularly gross ways.  One was Sherrod Brown, who had a disgusting ad that I, as a resident of Ohio, had to see one thousand times.  The other was Colin Allred, who did essentially the same thing as Brown:


Both these guys lost, running well behind Democratic performance in their state in 2018.  Transphobia is not just morally wrong, but is also an electoral loser, or at the very least an electoral dampener.  If you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing at all.

3.

Moments like these often serve as good reminders that many (if not most) Democratic electeds are really just Republicans and/or fascist enablers at heart.  Any serious movement to combat Trump and his policies must treat these people as the enemies that they are.


4.

To this end, plenty of people will argue that we missed our chance at avoiding fascism by not electing Kamala Harris.  Never let them forget that Kamala Harris accepted the endorsement of Dick Cheney, the most evil man of my lifetime.  Hard to "vote against fascism" when that's the other option.

5. 

There was a good deal of debate about the role Palestine played in the election.  I could devote thousands of words to this, but even then I don't know if I would come to a clear conclusion.  On one hand, there was some evidence that Harris changing her position on this might have mattered.  On the other hand, support for Israel is a load-bearing part of the bipartisan national security apparatus of which Kamala Harris is a key part.  And more importantly, voters implicitly understand this, rarely treating foreign policy as a particularly important reason for their voting decisions.  All this said, given that the election results point more towards Democratic lethargy rather than a fundamental shift to the right in the electorate, it's important to consider the second-order effects that facilitating a genocide may have on the people who work in Democratic campaigns. 




6.

The other point to make about Palestine in this context is that Democrat-controlled cities and states fully supported cracking down on peaceful campus protests, and then turned around and asked for voters to overlook this.  This is obviously a stark contradiction, which is made even stranger by the imperative to abandon such a politics the moment the election concluded.  The implicit (and sometimes explicit) ask by some in the pundit class to abandon the entirety of the "coalition" of voters that elected Trump is not only foolish and depoliticizing, but goes directly against the case you made to voters who care about Palestine.  The sooner Democrats understand and internalize that curiosity is generally more useful than contempt, the better.

“If you were able to overlook a genocide and cast a vote for Harris, you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him.”

7.

I made this point when the Dobbs decision came down and I'll make it again: Fascism, in its most American sense, is already here and has been for some time.  Trump does not represent a meaningful break from the American continuum but rather its most vulgar and dangerous expression.  And just like all other expressions of this fascist tendency, the most concrete way in which it will express itself is through the soldiers of capital.  Any genuine anti-fascist effort must understand this.

New 2022 body cam footage shows Atlanta PD cops manufacturing felonies to arrest Cop City protesters. When local officers say there were no felonies, APD Major says, "help us out…I know it's a reach." Those charges were then used for RICO charges against bail fund leaders.

[image or embed]

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 7:38 AM

8.

In the end, the "solution" to this, in a positive sense, is the same it's always been: Mass politics for the masses.  The elites of the Democratic Party have failed us again, so it's up to us to chart a different course—one that doesn't rely on the empty promises of Democrats or the false promises of Republicans, but on the true promise of the people, working together for our shared benefit.