Incidentally, one of the really nice things about the unjustly criticized Devil Wears Prada 2 is the last scene, where Meryl Streep says to Anne Hathaway, by way of discussing the sacrifices she has made over the years for her career as a journalist and an editor, including sacrifices foisted on her children, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?”

I thought it was a gutsy way to end the movie, particularly to have a woman say that, affirming the love of work that is worth loving, and how important that can be to leading a good life. Here’s Steinem on a related matter: “Not everybody with a womb has to have a child, like not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer. It’s a choice, and it’s a wonderful choice, but if everybody has to do it, it’s no longer a choice.” I also thought it was worthwhile to have Streep affirm not just the value of work, but of creative work, of writing work, in this age of AI and slop, which the movie also deals with, again, I think in a sensitive, intelligent, and, yes, entertaining, way.

Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: “What you think is criticism is nothing compared to the self-loathing I can bring to the table.” Faced with an antisemite’s ridicule, his making barbs about your being Jewish, turn the tables on him. Make his antisemitism into a contest or a game and see who plays it better. Show by your performance of truly outrageous antisemitism how bad he is at his. Show how superior a player, a performer, and ultimately a human being who can step outside himself, you are.

Heine tested this weapon in his infamous duel of words with August von Platen, a minor poet and middling playwright, and a gay, poor, aristocrat, who was hanging on to the thinnest branch of a once-solid family tree. Heine criticized Platen’s talent, and Platen responded with a full-length play, performed in Munich, that featured “witless word-plays” on Heine’s being Jewish. The humiliated Heine responded with a vicious homophobic attack on Platen’s sexuality and poetry—and a scathing skewering of his antisemitism. Heine recites a litany of antisemitic insults that appear in Platen’s play: “After spending several hours writing love songs, I sit myself down and hasten to circumcise ducats.” “On the Sabbath I huddle with long-bearded muttering Jews and sing the Talmud.” “On the eve of Easter I slaughter an underage Christian and, out of malice, always select a miserable writer to sacrifice.” In short, “I’m a real Jew.”

Heine pauses to catch his breath, then tells us that none of these insults in fact appear in Platen’s play. He’s made them all up. But that’s what’s wrong with the play: Heine had no choice but to invent antisemitic insults because Platen is not a sufficiently skilled antisemite to make them up on his own. He has “the best of motives”—that is, Platen’s an antisemite through and through—but he doesn’t “know how to make use of them.” If he were more gifted, if he were more talented, he’d come up with better digs. But he’s not, so he can’t, which leaves Heine with his final complaint: “It pains me deeply to see how the poor Count lets slip every opportunity for a good joke!”

Using a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theoretical smarts and humor, Dean detects a profound significance to the loss of reading that Large Language Models are enabling and pushing, far deeper than what we’ve all been fretting about with the decline of reading skills, student literacy, and all that.

According to Dean, Lacan tells us that language—and, through language, we might infer reading—is what infants learn through their separation from the mother (the mother in scare quotes; it’s really whoever is the provider of care). Language is how—or a representation of the fact that—the infant learns that its mother has desires independent from its needs, how the infant acquires words for its needs, and in acquiring words, how it acquires desires.

Desire is the space between our needs and their fulfillment. It is a space between longing and lack, pleasure and pain. We fill that space with language, with words to name our needs. Through naming our needs, our words create desire. Words are our desire. In that gap, which we fill with words that are our desire, we create a space of freedom, of subjectivity and autonomy. For all its frustrations, separation from the mother, or from whoever provides for the infant’s needs, is the key to the acquisition of language and ultimately freedom.

In Dean’s interpretation, AI—and she shows this through her analysis of the creepy utterances of Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg—promises to return us to the world of infancy, when all our needs are met, when there is no need to name our desire because we have no desire, since all our needs are met. This is the dreamscape, the propaganda, of AI; as Dean points out in her post, the reality is quite different.

AI is a return to a prelinguistic space. It’s no wonder that AI threatens our ability to read. It’s gunning for something far bigger and more fundamental to what it means to be human: our ability to use language itself.

You say Large Language Models? Dean says Large Language Mommies.

For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have been inordinately fearful of being plagiarized. You say coincidence? I say capitalism.) Now I just think it’s just one more sign of a growing nihilism.

In academia, it’s more of a mixed bag. There are cases of plagiarism where people don’t bat an eye or the person gets exonerated (the ones I am thinking of involve white men) and others where people, often of color, are brought down. More on that below.

As it happens, in the course of doing all this research for the introduction to this new translation of On the Jewish Question that Alex Gourevitch and I have been working on, I’ve noticed just how central plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism are both to the Jewish tradition and to antisemitism. It’s been eerie to read all these texts and debates against the backdrop of our current moment.

On the one hand, there is a great deal of fastidiousness within the Jewish tradition about plagiarism. Everyone is always citing someone else, and making a note of who it is. Rebbe x says y, Rebbe y says x. It’s part of the culture of dispute and recognition. On the other hand, there’s a sense in which the entire tradition is the product of one book, there’s only one truly creative entity in the universe, and we’re all quoting or quietly quoting the thoughts of someone else. So much so that we don’t need to be always acknowledging it. Without a lot of fetish for questions of intellectual ownership or originality or anything like that.

On the flip side, you have a long tradition among antisemites, particularly in Germany, saying the Jews are not original or authentic, they’re just imitators, the better their German, the more imitative they are. They’re frauds and con artists who are always passing off the true work and thoughts of other people as their own. In fact, that’s the very definition of the Jewish threat to European culture, in this view. Inauthenticity gets passed off as authenticity, copies as originals, imitations and frauds as the real thing. As one Viennese politician complained in 1907, “Culture is what one Jew plagiarizes from another.”

Then you have a problematic Viennese Jew like Karl Kraus, who converted to Catholicism and then de-converted, he said, “out of antisemitism.” Kraus loved to lean in to antisemitism and antisemitic stereotypes. He loved the idea of the inauthentic as the real, the pastiche and the fabricated and the citation as the one original truth. “I am perhaps the first case of an author who simultaneously experiences his writing as an actor,” he wrote. Whenever he writes, he’s just playing a role, speaking the lines someone else has written. Part of the point, the scholar Paul Reitter has argued (and from whom I’ve gotten all these quotes), was not simply to send up antisemitic stereotypes, but also to embrace them, to turn them into virtues, to show that he, Kraus, was not buying into the same scale of values as the antisemites who accused the Jews of being inauthentic.

Kraus is doubly interesting, again, as Reitter points out (and Sander Gilman confirms in his book), because there’s such a strong element in antisemitism of seeing journalism as essentially a Jewish activity. Like the Jew, the journalist is supposed to be someone who is parasitic on the words and ideas of others, essentially offering second-rate copy at dime-store prices. This stereotype arose in the early nineteenth century, again, of course, in Germany, and it continued in twentieth-century Vienna, with the feuilleton. Kraus leaned into that stereotype, too. “To have no thoughts and to be able to express them—that makes a journalist.” He was a journalist.

At a more personal level, I’m both horror-stricken and fascinated by the plagiarist. There’s something profoundly icky about passing off someone’s words as if they were your own. It makes me feel that the other person is a kind of sociopath, an actor who doesn’t realize they’re an actor. On the other hand, I admit to being attracted to Kraus’s fuck you to the demands and claims of authenticity, and the ickiness that often entails, and the idea of thumbing your nose at those who claim that you don’t really speak authentically or truthfully in your own language. That you don’t really have your own language.

Which brings us back to the dimension of racism in some of these academic debates about plagiarism. As I said, I know of cases involving white men, quite public and reported and all that, that ultimately went nowhere. But when scholars of color do it, it raises a similar specter, for their accusers, as the accusation of inauthenticity raised for the Jews coming out of the shtetl and into the world of “Enlightenment.” Essentially, you don’t belong here.

I am not—I repeat, I am not—saying that plagiarism is different if it’s committed by a scholar of color or a white scholar; it’s not, and it should be handled as the serious breach that it is. But I do think the cultural valence that gets provoked, disrupted, imbalanced, what have you, is different for scholars of color accused of plagiarism. In the same way that the more German a Jewish person tried to seem, the more they were accused of being not German, of faking their way through it, so do plagiarism scandals provoke a similar crisis and discourse of authenticity in the context of scholars of color—the idea being, essentially, you don’t belong here in academia—that they don’t arouse in the context of white scholars.

And, then, of course, there’s AI, which could put all of this discourse to bed. Permanently.

Ben Rhodes, who wrote the article, grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, got an MFA at NYU, was so mobilized by a sense of patriotism after 9/11 that he almost joined the military—he got as far as the Queensboro Bridge, where he met with a recruiter—but decided that he could best and truly serve his country by joining a think tank in DC instead. And from there it was the Obama White House.

Now here he is, however many years later, ejaculating over the “Kennedy-esque good looks,” the “boyish good looks,” of a young, and of course, moderate, Democratic candidate for governor.

The whole thing reminds me of the movie The Way We Were. The Robert Redford character wasn’t the fantasy or dream of Barbara Streisand; he was the fantasy and dream of Arthur Laurents, the screenwriter, also a New York Jew who had an idea of what the perfect goyisch golden child from America should look like.

In Rhodes’s case, the look is more the dreamscape of Alfred Rosenberg and Ernst Röhm than it is Robert Redford or John F. Kennedy. But the function or mask of the aesthetic is the same: paired with a relentless political moderation, it’s supposed to zhuzh up the pedestrian banalities of someone who’s got his political head buried in the sand, as if the people of Iowa aren’t smart or sophisticated enough to notice.

For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832:

The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below them, in the basement. Not being a Jew consoles them for not having been born a noble!

John C. Calhoun, South Carolina slaveholder and senator, vice president, and architect of what will later become the southern confederate position, declared this in 1848:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

And, of course, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote this in 1935:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.

All of which got me thinking: Where and when do we first find this theory of racism, whether against Blacks or Jews or some other stigmatized group, as a compensatory gesture for those who are on the penultimate lowest rank of the social ladder? It seems like you can’t really have such a theory until you have some sort of expectation of equality, which then gets frustrated or deferred, for as these quotations suggest, it’s precisely that frustration and deferral that racism is speaking to. But again, when and where does it first arise, not as a phenomenon, but as a formally stated theory or claim about the phenomenon?

This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated:

To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.

Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it to any one of the following statements that former President Joseph Biden has made over the course of his career.

In 2014, nine months before Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, Vice President Biden told a group of Jewish leaders:

You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States…there’s really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.

On October 12, 2023, five days after the Hamas attacks upon Israel, President Biden declared, “Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”

At a Hanukkah party in 2023, three months after the October 7 attacks, President Biden reiterated that “were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe. I make no bones about it.”

Even with all the passions and prejudices that attach to our beliefs about Israel and Palestine, I find it hard to believe that any reasonable Jewish person would feel safer listening to Biden— who is telling them that no matter what they do in the United States, the Jews will never be safe here, that they need Israel to be safe—versus El-Sayed’s saying that he sees the safety of the Jews as intimately bound with the safety of every other person in the United States, including that of his daughters.

I understand that you might not believe El-Sayed, but again, purely at the level of the rhetoric, you damn well should believe that El-Sayed is saying the right thing and Biden—and everyone he speaks for in the Democratic establishment—is saying the wrong thing. And when you hear the Bidens of this world saying what they say, you should be a lot more concerned than you are or may be when El-Sayed says whatever he says that is critical of Israel.

It just occurred to me, however, that all this time we’ve been arguing about the wrong person. The person Team Nietzsche really wants to conscript for its side, and could legitimately conscript, is Heinrich Heine.

Now, before everyone jumps to tell me what I already know—Nietzsche was a great reader and admirer of Heine—let’s remember that Nietzsche loved Heine’s language, his tone, his lightness, his cynicism, his wit. But there was a lot more to Heine than that. He really did want a revolution of plenitude, of material abundance as a precondition of moral and cultural transformation, and really did conceive of that as radical democracy.

Just one of his many thoughts on the matter:

In this, and in many other things, we differ from the men of the revolution. We do not want to be sans-culottes, frugal citizens, paltry presidents: we are founding a democracy of equally magnificent, equally holy, equally blissful gods. You demand simple clothing, abstemious habits, and unspiced pleasures; we, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple robes, sumptuous fragrances, pleasure and luxury, laughing nymph-dance, music and comedies. (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany)

Heine had that aesthetic disdain for the masses and the grubbiness of democracy that some liberal/left scholars do thrill into Nietzsche. But he also did genuinely believe in revolution and in material plenitude along with a revolution of morals and manners that would elevate everyone and expand the horizon of everyone. That belief in universal elevation and excellence is just not something Nietzsche thrills to at all; far from it.

So, Heine’s your guy!

Last night, at the New York City Center, my daughter and I saw Boléro performed as a ballet. A ballet is what the music was originally commissioned as, but it’s rarely performed that way anymore. It’s more often heard simply as an orchestral piece. The choreography was done by Maurice Béjart, who was born in Marseilles in 1927, and so, I assume, lived under Vichy in the 1940s. Hugo Marchand was the lead dancer, along with the Béjart Ballet in Lausanne, where I was just traveling last month.

The performance came as a revelation to me, one of those moments that irreversibly shape how you will see and experience a text or piece of music forever after (much like “10” did for me in the early 1980s, when I saw it on cable).

All the dancers were male, all wore black pants, with no top. Marchand, as the lead dancer, was on a platform of sorts, about six feet above the ground and above the other dancers. The music and a small light opened on him, solely on him, dancing tentatively to the melody. The other dancers were gathered as a square around him, sitting in chairs, below the platform on which he was dancing.

At first, it seemed like a nightclub. One dancer up high, everyone else below. But as the music proceeded, it became clear that we were somewhere else. Or maybe not.

The other dancers began to join in, in groups of four or so. Where Marchand kept dancing to the melody, these other dancers took up at that monotonous, mechanical rhythm line. Where Marchand moved in ever larger swoops and swirls, they moved in strict 90 degree motion, with an occasional circle or two. He was all gesture and freedom, they were all martinet and minimalism.

It soon became clear that we were listening not to the accompaniment to an x-rated film but to the music of a marching fascism. The costume choices, black pants and white skin, suddenly leapt into view as the uniforms of the SS, much the way Susan Sontag singled out those black Hugo Boss outfits for discussion in her pioneering essay “Fascinating Fascism.” The relationship between the alluring melody and the relentless, unchanging rhythm—visualized as the lead dancer and the surrounding, adoring troupe—came to sound like that between leader and led in the age of mechanical reproduction (or, I hate to say it, like an excerpt from Adorno’s problematic essay on jazz.) It also reminded me of the way that innocent tune in the first movement of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony quickly turns into the terrifying screech of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

The setting of a night club turned fascist rally also became legible—not only as yet another version of the Cabaret story (the Kander and Ebb musical came out after this particular version of Boléro premiered), a reference my daughter caught, but also as a way of weaving the necessary erotic threads into the fabric of fascism.

The fact that Béjart, the choreographer, as I said, whose first performance of Boléro premiered in 1961, grew up in Vichy France seems not unimportant. Also, the fact that another piece of music by Ravel, La Valse, has been read as the score for the spectacular crack-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the last days of the First World War, also seems not unimportant.

But also...Sontag’s essay on fascism came out in 1975. The Blake Edwards film came out in 1979. Sontag didn’t talk about Boléro or Ravel in that essay, but she did talk a lot about homoeroticism and fascism. She got criticized for that. Which made me wonder. When Blake Edwards used the music as the background noise of a heterosexual romantic comedy, it was associated with pure eroticism (and lousy art). When Béjart uses it as the accompaniment for a highly charged homoerotic piece of art, it conjures pure fascism.

Parker has hit all the familiar markers of status and success in an industry where is not so easy to succeed or acquire status. She’s obviously smart and skilled. She’s not a conservative. She’s more of a vacant lot, a person whose profession is devoted to words yet pays little attention to her own, a journalist whose job it is to cover the world yet whose sense of world is smaller than a toenail.

“Like anyone who’s spent any time around politics,” she begins, “I have many Lindsey Graham stories. This is perhaps my favorite.”

The tone is set: The life and times of a significant right-wing senator, who did unimaginable harm to so many people at home and abroad, will be turned into an insider’s yarn of Charleston and charm.

“I was covering Congress (Best! Beat! Ever!) for the New York Times when the Mother Emanuel shooting happened.”

For those who don’t get the Mother Emanuel reference—my first thought was that she was talking about a nun who’d been shot accidentally—Parker is referring to Dylan Roof’s massacre of nine Black people in a church in Charleston. That was in 2015, one of those moments when the entire political establishment summoned itself from senescence to mark what seemed, at the time, a hellish bottom to which the nation had fallen and below which it could not fall any further. We know better now.

That’s what happened when Ashley Parker’s spring break—Best! Beat! Ever!—was interrupted so that she could head down to Charleston to see how Graham was moving through the massacre and its aftermath.

Parker moves on with her “perhaps favorite” story of Lindsey Graham, when she suddenly remembers that she’s a reporter in Washington, and moments of mass murder call for a certain gravitas from “anyone who’s spent time around politics.” The “Mother Emanuel shooting” needs zhuzhing up. So now she tells us she’s been sent to Charleston to see how Graham, that august representative of the Most Important Deliberative Body of the World, is “grappling with the unimaginable.”

With that out of the way, Parker can return to Spring Break and get to the real point of the story, which is her sweater and sweat stains, Graham’s disdain for the icky and the sticky, and the big box store where she buys a new dress.

And that is how you become a senior reporter in Washington, where you cover the comings and goings of the people who run the world, people who bomb countries without giving it a moment’s thought because, in part, the people who write about them don’t give it a moment’s thought either. That’s the real icky and sticky of our country.

(If you think my spring break references are unfair, ask yourself why reporters so often describe themselves not as former employees of the New York Times or the Washington Post, or wherever they once worked, but as “alums” of those places and papers? I noticed this when I was writing about the Obamanauts a few years ago. No one worked for Teach for America. No one worked as a congressional staffer. They all were “alums” of some institution or another. It’s as if the political and cultural establishment sees themselves and their development entirely in relationship to some school, even if what they’re describing is not a school at all. Which, come to think of it, may be exactly how they think of themselves: as perpetual students moving effortfully through the halls of power.

On that front of schools, and I realize the irony of what I’m about to say, but here goes: I think many of us carry around a certain archetype in our heads of a type of person we can’t stand, who gets under our skin and makes us wonder how they are who they are. For many centrists and liberals—Jonathan Chait comes immediately to mind, though he’s hardly the only one—that person is the trendy lefty from college, maybe high school. And I get their irritation; I was never a fan of those people in college myself. For me, the archetype is this sort of reporter, the ambitious weenie who’s wanted since college to be an insider of some sort, whether as a staffer or politician or journalist, yet who hasn’t had a thought in their head that hasn’t been handed to them by the idiot conventions of the day. There’s something about that marriage of intensity and ambition to what seems to me the most pathetic and picayune projects that just makes me wonder, and wonder more, how such people exist.)

The principle of birthright citizenship states that it matters not a whit who your parents are or where they’re from; you are a citizen of the United States merely by the fact that you were born on its soil. That’s it. Birthright citizenship is based on the principle of jus soli—Latin for “right of the soil.” The opposite of jus soli is jus sanguinis—”right of blood.” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neal Gorsuch, who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision, were arguing against jus soli, and much of Thomas’s opposition to birthright citizenship stems from his belief that the 14th Amendment is dedicated not only to enslaved Africans in the United States but also to their descendants. Jus sanguinis.

People can argue over whether Palestinians living with the Israel of pre-1967 borders—borders that ceased to be relevant long ago—are equal citizens of Israel or not. But what cannot be denied is that Israel sees itself as the state of the Jewish people. Not the state of the people who happen to live within its borders, whatever those borders may be.

We know this because anyone living anywhere in the world who is Jewish, which is determined overwhelmingly by matrilineal descent, has the right to immigrate and become a citizen of Israel. Not so anyone who is Palestinian who lives in, say, Newark, who has a mother, say, living in Jerusalem. That person has no right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen there. Even if they were born there.

On those grounds alone it’s easy to see that Palestinians living within Israel do not have the same rights as Jews living within Israel. In this instance, a Palestinian mother in Israel is permanently separated from her child while a Jewish mother would have the right of reunification with her child.

Beyond the individual rights of Palestinians versus Jews, we have the larger question of democracy. No one who is not a fanatical Trumpist thinks it would be a step toward democracy to overturn birthright citizenship. The reason being that it’s very clear jus sanguinis seeks to create a lower caste of beings (that’s why Justice Jackson was so insistent on using that language of caste in her concurring opinion yesterday), elevating the native born and their progeny while subjugating those whose parents were not born here. No one believes overturning birthright citizenship will eliminate all immigrants; nativists are perfectly happy to have a lower caste of servile beings who do the shit work and get no rights. The question is whether they receive citizenship. The same goes for Jews in Israel and those who affirm that it must remain a Jewish State.

It might seem outrageous to claim that when it comes to birthright, Israel stands on the far end of the Clarence Thomas spectrum. But the two—Israel and Thomas—are closer in spirit than you might think. Both speak on behalf of a historically victimized group—Jews in the case of Israel, Blacks in the case of Thomas—and both use that victim status of the past to create a new class of victims in the present.

By a perverse twist of language, Israel affirms the principle of birthright citizenship. The twist is that it is birth to a Jewish mother—jus sanguinis—that matters, and not birth on Israeli soil. And indeed, when Jewish teenagers from around the world are given free trips to Israel, where they get to see the glories of the Promised Land, the trips are called “Birthright.”

As it happens, these were three of Trump’s biggest challenges to prevailing conservative and Republican orthodoxy. And on each one, he failed.

How to read that failure?

I think the simplest explanation is that the Roberts Court is, above all, a neoliberal Court. Trump’s challenge to free trade and independent monetary policy—as well as the idea of the United States being a nation of the people who are born there, not a nation of blood but a nation of birth—simply proved a bridge too far for six of the nine justices, two of whom were appointed by Trump.

On other issues—most critically, the expansion of presidential power, and to a lesser degree, restrictions on voting rights (I say “to a lesser degree” because most of that work of restricting voting rights had already been done to a significant degree before this Trump term)—the Court had virtually no issue with Trump. There’s a reason for that: unlike the tariffs or independence of the Fed or birthright citizenship, expansive presidential power and restrictions on voting rights are issues that were well within the mainstream of conservative politics, that conservative litigators, law professors, activists, and judges have been working out for at least a half-century.

While I have no illusions that this Court will serve as a check on state repression or preserver of civil rights and civil liberties, I do think the Court is functioning as previous Supreme Courts have functioned: namely, as a preserver and marker of the boundaries of the existing political regime. If we say that we are still living within the Reagan/neoliberal regime, we should expect the Court to maintain that regime, just as the Warren and even, to some degree, the Burger Courts did with the New Deal and the Great Society. Once those regimes collapse, as they did with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the Court’s function changed.

This year’s rulings, with its combination of wins for Trump and genuine defeats for Trump, continues in that tradition. Spelled out in terms of ideological substance, it is a tradition that will not blink before repressive state power, unless that power violates the basic capstones of neoliberal capitalism: no tariffs, no political control over monetary policy, no fundamental redefinition of the nation such as to preclude, now and forever, the children of immigrants.

On birthright citizenship, I was struck by two opinions: Roberts’s majority opinion and Jackson’s concurring opinion.

In his majority opinion, Roberts writes:

In a Nation of immigrants—an “asylum for mankind,” in Thomas Paine’s words—jus soli’s broad scope took on particular importance.”

It’s a strong claim, with reverberations extending far beyond this case. It affirms three values, all of which are at variance with Trump and Trumpism: the right of asylum, the United States is a nation of immigrants, and jus soli (the proposition citizenship depends on where you are born, not who your parents are). It’s too bad the Court didn’t remember any of these principles in the two immigration/presidential power cases it decided last week. Even so, it’s striking to see their affirmation here.

As always, Jackson remains the most interesting justice on the Court, at least to me. No one has resisted the Trump regime more strongly, but more important, no one has articulated a vision of left liberalism for the future the way she has.

As she often does in her opinions, Justice Jackson takes aim at Clarence Thomas. She takes the fight against him, and all conservatives, exactly where it needs to be fought. I’ll just give her the floor:

Even worse, JUSTICE THOMAS’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.

...

That bears repeating: Freed Blacks did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation. Nor did they seek to advance their own position relative to, or at the expense and exclusion of, other marginalized groups. Instead, those whose gatherings helped galvanize the push for full equality understood that ‘[a] diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny.’ The firmest foundation for freedom would require an anticaste reset—’both for his sake and for ours’—and would benefit all.

During his U. S. Senate candidacy, Abraham Lincoln developed a similar vision. In the lead-up to the now-famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln explained that the promise of liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence ‘was held sacred by all, and thought to include all.’ Lincoln expressly and intentionally linked the fate of Black Americans and immigrant groups (’among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all’ of the Founders), and noted that the Nation’s future hinged on a universal definition of citizenship that excluded neither. He explained that the Declaration’s promise that ‘all men are created equal’ was the ‘electric cord . . . that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together,’ regardless of race or descent.

The case was made. First, there was war. And then, the delegates’ (and Lincoln’s) universalist view of citizenship made its mark on the Constitution.”

...

As I have shown in this opinion, the Fourteenth Amendment is not color-blind; rather, its core principle is that our Nation does not tolerate racial caste—i.e., the systemic subordination that many (even some who opposed slavery) had wished to perpetuate after the Civil War. So, the architects of the Second Founding did not think or pretend that race didn’t matter. Quite to the contrary, they understood that race made an enormous difference to the lived experiences of all concerned—and to the fate of our union. Indeed, it is for that very reason that a radical restructuring was required....

Putting a finer point on this: When colonizationists objected to changing their norms to accommodate the equal citizenship and rights of freedmen, freed Blacks and their allies organized to push for a Constitution that would bring their own antisubordination vision to fruition. That kind of ambitious transformation—nothing less than the remaking of the soul of a Nation beset by rank, entrenched race-based prejudice and inequity—did not come for free, or purely by the say-so of those who claimed to be ‘color-blind.’ It required heavy lifting, a fundamental shift—the very thing for which the Fourteenth Amendment stands: a repudiation of the notion that there is a ‘superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,’ and a willingness to see, and strive to eliminate, all remaining vestiges of historical subjugation....

Thus, even in cases where the protagonist was not a Black American, this Court’s Fourteenth Amendment cases have focused, at bottom, on the same universal liberty and equality interests that motivated the Fourteenth Amendment itself. The question is (and always has been): Does the affected individual or group enjoy equal dignity? And the correct answer is (and has always been) to heed the Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist, antisubordination command. Our Nation did not undergo something as profound and world-shifting as ‘Reconstruction’ for naught.

...

Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people. And the Great Emancipator eventually foresaw that the only path forward that could prevent a return—in any form—to slavery and race-based subordination was to link the fates of all.

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Ultimately, then, it is the Government and JUSTICE THOMAS who have ‘repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment.’ By ignoring that our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subjugation—on all axes and in all manners—they deny the clear, universalist vision shared and proclaimed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers: to ‘rebuild a shattered empire . . . to plant deep and solid the corner-stone of eternal justice, and to erect thereon a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.’

I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel or container of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party in the world—and, as Kevin Phillips famously called it, the second most capitalist political party in the world—the Democratic Party needn’t survive forever. So let’s just use “Democratic Party” as a stand-in for whatever left-of-center party there is or may be in the decades to come. Second, I don’t know that the Democratic Party today is widely known as liberal. Let’s say instead that “liberal” has basically been the term for the dominant left-of-center ideology in America for about a century now.

With those two tweaks in mind, I think Judis poses an interesting scenario that’s worth discussing here.

But before we get to that scenario, we need to do a bit of intellectual housekeeping. In my experience, there is nothing more difficult to talk about on the internet than “liberalism.” There are the obvious reasons: People disagree about its desirability, and people disagree about its definition. So we’re already set up for difficulty and confusion. But more than that, people don’t readily understand why they disagree about liberalism’s definition, much less its desirability. There are so many deep and unacknowledged, even unconscious, sources of misunderstanding between the people who argue about liberalism on the internet, it’s a wonder we can carry on a conversation all. Most times, we don’t.

So before we can talk about whether democratic socialism will one day replace liberalism as the lingua franca, the basic grammar, of left-of-center political culture and discourse in this country, we have to understand what we talk about when we talk about liberalism, or, put differently, what we disagree about when we disagree about liberalism.

For starters, liberalism in the United States means something different from liberalism in Europe and Latin America (I’m less certain about Africa and Asia). On these other continents, liberalism has long been identified with free markets and constitutionalism, and with a less than minimal appreciation of democracy. While hardly the same as conservatism, liberalism has a fairly conservative—and certainly counterrevolutionary—valence in Europe and Latin America, and not just in recent years due to the right’s embrace of “neoliberalism.” The affinity between liberalism and counterrevolution goes way back in Europe, at least to the nineteenth century. In the United States, by contrast, particularly during the New Deal era, liberalism was the tradition that voiced skepticism, if not outright opposition to, free markets, sought to turn the Constitution from a limiting constraint on the state into an expansive charter of state control over or limitation of markets, and pushed for an extension of democracy.

Beyond this geographical divide between the United States and other parts of the world, we have a historical cleavage within the United States. For older generations, by which I mean my generation of elder Gen Xers and above, liberalism was essentially the American version of social democracy. You can find all sorts of evidence for that, but two sources I’d flag are Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (or any of Roth’s other historical novels, really). Schlesinger’s the more surprising text because we think of that text as the anticommunist manifesto, which in many ways it is. But it’s also firmly committed to social democracy and even has an entire chapter dedicated to a positive account of class struggle. As much as liberals like Schlesinger were opposed to communism, so were they opposed to unregulated capitalism and conservatism.

But for younger people—by which I mean millennials and Gen Z and beyond—liberalism means nothing but a corrupt bargain with power and capitalism, the worst sorts of neoliberalism that we associate with the Clintons, compromise that does not produce anything but confusion and concessions. (Eleanor Roosevelt, by contrast, said, by all means compromise, but when you do compromise, make you sure you compromise UP.) As an elder Gen Xer, I’ve often been surprised by the vehemence and hostility of younger generations to liberalism. Not because I disagree with them—I don’t—but because for my generation, liberalism was a more complicated antagonist. I’m not used to this kind of hostility. But for younger generations, liberalism is, without a question, the shittiest ideology. Except for Trumpism, of course, which at least has the virtue of not pretending to be anything other than it is (except to addled mainstream journalists).

Beyond geography and generation, we have a divide, among academics, between political theorists and, well, everyone else. Ironically, it’s political theorists (and some of our allies in English literature departments) who probably have the longest historical view of liberalism, whereas most historians and social scientists and comp lit scholars and some philosophers tend to think of liberalism in strictly twentieth-century terms. Political theorists, by contrast, trace liberalism back, first and foremost, to the early years of the nineteenth century in France and Spain, and sometimes, though we disagree on this one, back to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain and France. We take seriously liberalism’s commitments to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, constitutionalism, and, even, on occasion, democracy, because we’ve seen how the ideology has played out on a longer time scale and continental expanse. Most other scholars, I’ve found, particularly in history and American Studies and the social sciences, are like the younger generations I’ve described above: implacably hostile to liberalism and therefore a little less vexed in their accountings of it.

And last, of course, we have the political divide in this country between Republicans and Democrats, between right and left, conservatives and liberals, which has led to all kinds of confusion about what liberalism really is, with liberals in recent decades basically abandoning the term in the hopes of rebranding themselves as progressives (that was the Clinton move) or something else.

Okay, back to Judis’s prediction that in the next ten to 15 years, “democratic socialism” will become the dominant term of self-understanding on the broad swath of the left-of-center spectrum that extends from mainstream Democrats further to the left, much in the way that liberalism once was.

John has his reasons for why he thinks this may be possible, but I want to focus on the consequence of this development, should it occur. The consequences, in particular, for political culture, both among intellectuals and in the basic common sense of political life.

It’s hard to overestimate how important it was that, within the United States, New Dealers embraced the language of “liberalism” to describe what it was that they were doing. Within a fairly short period time, starting in 1933 or so, liberalism became the moniker or “brand,” as we now say, of the Democratic Party. And with that branding came the kinds of cleavages, and common culture, that I’ve described above. With New Dealers, from the most mainstream to the more left union types, taking up the term liberalism as inclusive of policies and programs that ranged from the welfare state to social democracy, from early forms of state planning to military Keynesianism and beyond, liberalism became the dominant term of disagreement on the left-of-center.

Liberalism set the pace for our national conversation, such that we got books like Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America, which essentially liberalism as the only ideology in America. Or when Hofstadter says that America (by which he means liberalism) has the unfortunate destiny of being an ideology rather than having an ideology. In much the same way that we get scholars today claiming that the United States was always conservative, always Trumpist, always fascist, or what have you—generalizing from a movement to a moment to an entire national way of life—so did scholars claim, once upon a time, that America was always liberal. (Not true, but that doesn’t matter here.) That was the effect of the New Deal: it imprinted itself on a generation, which then imprinted itself upon subsequent generations, creating liberalism as the way we understand ourselves.

None of this, it should be stressed, was preordained. The New Dealers could have chosen a different self-description, and indeed, one of the reasons that free market opponents of the New Deal took on the label “neoliberal” in the late 1930s, was that they were furious that the New Dealers had claimed the term for themselves, effectively stealing it from the free-market tradition of the 19th century that anti-New Dealers looked back to. Liberalism is a complicated ideology, and it can be pushed in many different directions. In the US, it got pushed in the left direction it got pushed, and because the US was the hegemon that it became, the term became a term of global contestation.

But what if democratic socialism, for all the reasons of contingency and circumstance that went into the production of “liberalism” in the 20th century, becomes the moniker, or brand, or whatever, of an entire new generation of political actors, not just on the fringe, not just in New York City, but across the country? What if these democratic socialists come to speak for an entire generation, and are able to put their imprint on generations to come, the way that Roth did with the imprint of “liberalism,” long after the New Deal was over?

I’m not talking, again, at the level of policy or politics or program. I’m talking at the level of political culture.

Insofar as language and words have power—a big if, about which I’m often dubious—things might get interesting.

The people that don’t agree with their [DSA] philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized.

The cocktail party circuit, in other words, has to get organized. Suozzi, by the way, represents the two peninsulas where West Egg and East Egg, of Great Gatsby fame, were set.

Below is the paper I delivered on “Wolin’s Political Unconscious: On Sublimation, Lenin, and Freud.” It’s a close reading of the last two chapters of Wolin’s most important book, Politics and Vision. And while that might seem a narrow topic, it deals with a theme that consumed thinkers from Nietzsche and Weber to Arendt and Schmitt (and was formative to me at an earlier age): the trajectory of “the political.” I’ve found that, in working through Wolin’s ideas of sublimation and politics, I’ve been able to approach economics and political economy in a different vein from how political theorists in this tradition usually approach the matter.

For ease of reading, I have taken out all the footnotes with specific page numbers and references, but I have compiled a bibliography of the works I’ve cited at the end.

***

One of the less noticed elements of Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision is the presence of Freud on the page.

By the presence of Freud, I mean two things.

The first is atmospheric. To conjure the mindset and mood of modern liberalism, Wolin makes frequent allusions to Freud and to psychoanalytic terms. He opens his penultimate chapter, on liberalism, with an epigraph from Studies in Hysteria, where Freud states that the aim of psychoanalysis is to “transform hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.” He compares Mill’s theory of human nature to Freud’s theory of repression. In his discussions of Locke on property, Franklin on pleasure, Bentham on profit, and Rousseau’s republic, Wolin drops Freudian and neo-Freudian mentions of object libido, status anxiety, sadomasochism, and identity crisis. The cumulative effect of these allusions is to suggest that the modal actor of liberal theory is not the robust and rational seeker of one’s preferences but a fragile creature of neurotic need. The so-called Economic Man of Hume, Smith, Malthus, and the Mills, is really the Psychological Man of Freud. “Psychoanalysis,” Wolin concludes, “is the science necessitated by the liberal ethos.”

The second Freudian presence is less atmospheric than analytical. Wolin makes deliberate and extensive use of the category of sublimation, which is a key concept in psychoanalysis, to explain the trajectory of “the political” in the Age of Organization, a period of time extending from roughly the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. When sublimation appears in the last chapter of Politics and Vision, it comes as a surprise. In the previous chapter, on “Liberalism and the Decline of Political Philosophy,” Wolin had made a strong case that the political had been displaced, then disappeared, by the economic and the social. The vocabulary of elimination and extinction in that chapter is total. Under the regime of sublimation, however, we see not the disappearance of the political but “the diffusion of the political.” The problem is not “the decline of the political,” Wolin now says, “but the absorption of the political into non-political institutions and activities.” Politics has not been displaced; it has been diverted.

I’d like to argue here that this vocabulary of sublimation is neither modish nor metaphorical. The psychoanalytic opens a real corridor for Wolin, down which he can pursue a story about the political that goes beyond the conventional declension narrative that he’s just told in the previous chapter and that we often hear from other theorists of the political such as Weber, Schmitt, and Arendt. Where each of those theorists narrates a story of the decline of homo politicus, who is replaced by homo economicus or some other substrate of human being, Wolin tells a more complex and nuanced story of the recreation of homo politicus in a new setting.

In this regard, his work bears reading in the context not of German theorists of political decline but of more complex and conjunctural American writers such as the historian Carl Schorske, whose Fin-de-Siecle Vienna also makes use of the category of sublimation, and the sociologist Philip Rieff, whose Freud: The Mind of the Moralist remains the best book on Freud.

Sublimation offers Wolin a path that he sees, yet can never, for reasons that will become clear, fully see his way through. Sublimation, in other words, is the key to Wolin’s political unconscious. Its most telling symptom, I’ll argue, appears in the most improbable of places—in his analysis of Lenin.

***

In Freud’s account, sublimation begins with a sexual instinct or drive that is both primary and problematic. Primary, because while Freud believed in the plasticity of our sexual instincts, he also insisted that adult human sexuality contains vestigial or residual elements, traceable to infancy, that cannot be incorporated into our maturing desire. Hence, primary. Problematic, because those residual elements either fail to serve the functions of sexual reproduction and sexual intimacy, rendering them unusable to adults, or violate deep-seated taboos of civilization, causing persistent suffering and pain in adults. Hence, problematic. Thus, primary and problematic—and eligible for sublimation.

With sublimation, the sexual instinct is transformed. Its aim is diverted to a non-sexual object. It can now be satisfied through socially acceptable outlets, like art, work, and sociability. And while the sublimated drive is just as insistent as the original sexual instinct, it has shed the anarchy, the convulsive discharge, the disruptiveness, of the original. The sexual instinct remains, in other words, but with an altered aim and more controlled intensity.

It might seem strange to describe Wolin as thinking or writing about the political in this vein. Like Arendt, Wolin is supposed to be the theorist of all things political and the opponent of all things that detract from it, including the psychological turn of modern social science. If he uses the word sublimation, we should assume he’s being ironic or cheeky, without intending anything Freudian or psychoanalytic by the term.

I want to challenge that reading, which used to be my own, to argue that Wolin is using sublimation in the psychoanalytic sense. There are many reasons for favoring the psychoanalytic reading. For starters, there’s a noticeable turn in how Wolin talks about the political in this last chapter. In earlier chapters, Wolin refers to the political as an order, a public setting with distinctive rules and claims, its own style of action and mode of engagement. Though he discusses individuals and agents in these chapters, they, and the motion and energy of his argument, flow downstream from the political. In his chapter on Machiavelli, for example, Wolin begins with an epigraph from John Dewey: “This is the question finally at stake in any genuinely moral situation: What shall the agent be? What sort of character shall he assume?” The political (“any genuine moral situation”) issues its requirements, in other words; the question for human beings is how to navigate them.

In this last chapter, on the sublimation of the political, the energy and motion of the argument flow in the opposite direction, from the individual to the political. Wolin introduces a personal, almost erotic vocabulary—not to decry the decline of the political but to describe its persistence. The political cannot be accounted for as a distinctive order—as the Aristotelian polis, for example, or the Machiavellian republic or the Hobbesian state. It is found, instead, in the distinctive desires, the residual “satisfactions” and “needs,” that human beings seek and derive from an activity and way of life. The political is now the site of our “long[ing] for community,” a place where our “energies” are exerted and expended. “There still exists,” writes Wolin, “an impressive capacity for political participation which is not, however, being diverted towards the traditional forms of political life.” In other words, there still exists, within the self, a residual drive, desire, capacity, for political things, derived from the infant stages of our civilization. Conceived as an order, the political may have disappeared. Conceived as an instinct, it is alive and well. As Wolin says, “the political animal is not extinct.”

What happens when an instinct is robust, but its public expression is constrained? The same thing that Freud said happens to the sexual instinct: it gets sublimated. Our ancient/infantile political instincts have been channeled and directed to another form: the organization. Intensifying the language of sexual instinct and sublimation, Wolin writes that in the Age of Organization, “man has fashioned [a] substitute love-object[] for the political.” There has been a “transference”—Freud saw transference as a mode of sublimation—“of the political” from the state to the organization.

The psychoanalytic valence of sublimation, in short, is a real presence in Wolin’s account.

***

Freud stumbled upon his theory of sublimation early; it first appears in his paper on Dora. Despite its persistence across his subsequent writing, however, he was never able to figure out, to his own satisfaction, how it worked. He was certain that sublimation occurred. He just couldn’t explain its mechanics. According to Jonathan Lear, that’s still true. “The nature of sublimation remains an outstanding problem for psychoanalysis.”

But the confusion about sublimation involves more than an uncertainty about its causal pathway. Sublimation raises moral and political questions—for Freud, and, as we’ll see, for Wolin—about the desirability of the process itself, of how we should evaluate the transformation of what is primary and original into something that is secondary and derivative.

On one view, elements of which you can find in Freud, sublimation is the not-so-distant cousin of repression. It’s costly and cruel. For a lucky few, it takes the form of artistic creativity. For the rest of us, it appears as disgust and shame, in which the energy of the sexual instinct is converted into the “mental dam[]” of our internal moral judgments, which stop the unimpeded “flow” of our desires. One part of our sexual instinct is harnessed to suppress the remainder of that instinct, making the individual his own miserable jailer.

Even if sublimation does not take the form of repression, but is instead expressed as art or literature, even if the instinct finds another outlet, it loses a considerable amount of intensity on the road to expression. The beneficiary of sublimation is society, not the self, which suffers a net loss of enjoyment and happiness. “Each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community,” writes Freud. Sublimation is the price we pay for civilization, and it comes “at the cost” of our most basic, originating impulses.

Wolin sometimes reads the sublimation of the political in this vein—that is, as a loss of vitality and feeling. Like Freud’s sublimation, Wolin’s begins with an earlier, more primary set of political instincts, which once had the privilege of being expressed openly and directly. As civilization matures, that direct experience of the political is sublimated into our membership in an organization, which offers us an ersatz experience of the political, a substitute that’s second-rate. Organization Man does not have the opportunity to engage in political activity, political action, or conflict. He is the object of manipulation rather than the beneficiary of leadership.

As is the case with any form of sublimation, the individual makes some gains. More of his passions are satisfied; Fourier counted 810. He suffers fewer pains. He’s psychically integrated into the organization, spared the loneliness and isolation that are otherwise rampant in modern societies.

But the overall effect of the organization is to erase the individual as a site of experience. There are no agents or selves in the organization, even among its leadership. Everyone is narrowed into a function or functionary. Without selves, there can be no political experience. There is just the functioning whole: efficient, integrated, orderly, productive, advancing. Like Freud, Wolin describes this as a net loss of intensity and feeling: “One result of this kind of theorizing” about the organization, he says, “has been to flatten the traditional majestas of the political order. This been achieved by reducing the political association.”

***

Yet Freud also gives us, and Wolin, a different way of thinking about sublimation. Not as a loss but as an achievement, and not just for civilization and the whole but for the self.

For Freud, the alternative to sublimation is not the unrestrained and liberated expression of the libido. It is profound suffering. Not because civilization cannot accommodate our anarchic sexuality, but because our developing selves cannot survive that anarchy. No matter how emancipated a society may be, not every sexual instinct can be gratified, all the time. The desired objects of our satisfaction may not be available. They may rebuff our desires and wants. When we cannot satisfy our sexual desires, we suffer tremendous physical and psychic discomfort. Desire ceases to be an instrument our pleasure; we become a victim of its tyranny.

Sublimation allows our fragile self to gain control, mastery, over those instincts. Minimally, we no longer feel so intensely the pain of frustration and disappointment. Maximally, we find pleasure in activities, like art, that are less dependent upon the vicissitudes of ourselves and other people. Where our sexual instincts demand discharge and then disappear, our sublimated passions get exercised and develop. As we acquire skills and capacities in these activities, we become “masters of the situation.” We “pass[] over from the passivity” of our immature sexuality to active participants in “the activity of the game.” Seen in this light, sublimation is not a form of repression forced upon us by civilization; it is a tool we adopt and wield for our self-development and cultivation.

Wolin doesn’t often speak of the sublimation of the political in this way, but there is one, very intriguing, moment in the last chapter of Politics and Vision where he does. And that is in his discussion of Lenin.

I should say, at the outset, that I don’t think Wolin believes he is describing Lenin’s sublimation as any kind of achievement. But I think that that is in fact what Wolin is doing. We might say that in discussion of Lenin, Wolin is sublimating his own unprocessed instincts about the fate of the political in the Age of Organization. To read in the way I am proposing is to open a window on his political unconscious.

To appreciate what Wolin is doing with Lenin, we have to remember two of Wolin’s claims about the modern world. First, he argues that 1789, the year of “the great revolution,” was “the time when the political order had mustered its failing forces for a last-ditch attempt to assert its general responsibility for the well-being of society.” Like Arendt, Wolin believes that revolutions are modernity’s mode of political action. Unlike Arendt, Wolin praises the French Revolution, particularly its assertion that politics can superintend the whole, and eulogizes it as the last moment that such assertion will occur.

Second, though Wolin lodges many complaints against the Age of Organization, his last and largest grievance with the age is that organization consigns human beings to a restricted function. No one, not even the elites who manipulate the organization and its cogs, gets to see or partake of the whole. Seeing and superintending the whole is what the political is, in part, about, and that is precisely what has been lost with the Age of Organization.

That makes what Wolin has to say about Lenin all the more remarkable. Unlike other nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists, who thought that organization would turn politics into administration, Lenin was “the first to seize the implications of transferring politics, political theory, political action—all that we have subsumed under the ‘political’—to the plane of organization.” Far from diminishing or diluting politics, Lenin understood that “the trick” of organization “was not to destroy the political, but to absorb it into organization, to create a new compound.”

According to Wolin, Lenin was able to break with other organizational thinkers because he understood revolution to be the central task of organization. With his focus on revolution, Lenin shattered the nineteenth-century commitment to economic action and to “the primordial importance of economic phenomena.” That belief in the economic spanned liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, says Wolin. Lenin understood the distinctiveness of political action, as opposed to economic and other kinds of actions. With Lenin’s theory of organization, Wolin writes, “political action was rescued from limbo and restored to a new primacy, new because revolution was proclaimed the quintessential form of political action.”

With that as his foundation, Wolin proceeds to paint a portrait of Lenin as a political theorist in the classical mold. Lenin’s faults cannot be chalked up to any kind of diminishing sense of the political, but to a problem Wolin has been tracing since the start of Politics and Vision: where the political becomes so exalted, as it does with Plato, that it eclipses politics. Before he gets to that eclipse, however, Wolin sets out a roster of Lenin’s achievements as a political theorist. Not only does Lenin rescue the political from economism, but he recreates the polis in the form of the party. The Leninist party, says Wolin, is the opposite of the narrow organization. The party deals “with the comprehensive, with what transcend[s] class horizons and interests.” Through the party, workers “acquire an ‘all-sided political consciousness’ responsive to ‘all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse.” Through the party, workers get a political education along the lines of “a very ancient notion.” They gain “a synthetic view of the whole.”

In his comparison to the ancients, Wolin instructively contrasts Lenin to Weber. Where Weber is depicted as the romantic plaything of ancient dreams of classical heroism, similar to the un-sublimated self that suffers the anarchy and fortuna of his infantile sexual instincts, Wolin casts Lenin’s superiority over Weber as one of mastery and sublimation. While Weber dreams, and dreams and dreams and dreams, Lenin takes those ancient political impulses, disciplines them through “art” and “timing,” and thereby “preserves ‘the energy, the stability and continuity’” of political action. Much as the Freudian sublimation of sexuality preserves and even enhances our energy and drive, so does the Leninist sublimation of our political instincts. Through the party, says Wolin, revolutionaries are able to “‘concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular excitement’ into ‘a single gigantic flood.’”

Wolin being Wolin, it would be too much to expect from him an unnuanced or unqualified appreciation of Lenin’s political achievement. But what is so remarkable about his criticisms of Lenin, when they come, is how much they undermine Wolin’s overall account of sublimation as a diminution or the dissolution of the political. Wolin’s two major criticisms of Lenin are that he was antidemocratic and elitist, and that he suppressed “party rivalries, legislative maneuvers, the frictions generated by governmental units, and the struggle for group advantage.” Like Plato and so many of the great classical political theorists before him, in other words, Lenin was so enthralled by the political that he lost sight of politics.

That, as I’ve said, is a very old story in political theory. Indeed, it’s the old story that Wolin has been tracing since the beginning of his book. But if that’s the case, Wolin’s story turns out to be less one of innovation and decline, which is how he is often read, than of continuity and persistence, of a struggle that does not recede but simply takes on a new form. Sublimation marks not a loss but a reinvention, a theory of the political that we can perhaps make use of today.

Bibliography

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Character and Anal Eroticism (1908), and On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (1912), in Sigmund Freud on Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1977.

Sigmund Freud, “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908), and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in Freud, Civilization, Society, and Religion, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1985.

Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism (1914). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey. Volume XIV, pp. 67-102.

Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1977 [1920].

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961 [1930].

Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1965 [1933].

Jonathan Lear, Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.

I won’t go through all the obvious problems with the claim. I’m more fascinated by idea that somehow it’s part of our inheritance, our heritage, our privilege, our right, our pleasure and our joy, as Jews, to get to decide what antisemitism is. It’s not that, as Jews, we get to worship God as we see fit, or we get to celebrate our holidays as we see fit (and even, as is the case in New York, have the government acknowledge our holidays as public holidays), or that we get to cherish and teach our authors and texts. No, the great privilege of being a Jew is we get to decide what antisemitism is.

Jews used to say, my God is a jealous God. Then it became my genocide is a jealous genocide (and thou shalt have no other genocides before me). Now it’s my racism is a jealous racism, and only I get to decide what it is. I know she’s problematic in many ways, but I’d love to see Amy Schumer doing a bit about this, where she treats antisemitism as a stuffy, and does her pouty, no, you can’t have it, only I get to have it, this antisemitism is mine!

It’s so comic and ghoulish at the same time, you’d think only someone like Kafka could have dreamed it up. As it turns out, the world is such that it no longer takes a literary genius to come up with something as hilariously brilliant as that. Any schmuck on the internet can do it.

One of the steady drumbeats in these conversations is privilege. My privilege as a senior scholar with social media followers, Beckert’s privilege as a Harvard professor, Riley’s privilege as a male Marxist, and on and on.

But there’s a kind of privilege that never gets mentioned in these flame wars, and that is the privilege of bad writing, of being a bad writer yet expecting everyone to listen to you, engage with you, respond to you.

There are three kinds of bad writers on social media platforms.

First, there are the droners, the monologuers, who go on and on, holding the floor without any consideration of the person who might be listening to them. We shouldn’t confuse the droner with the maker of long comments. There’s nothing wrong with a long comment. Reality is complicated, and sometimes it requires a lot of words to account for it. That’s not the droner’s problem, though he’ll often try to justify his droning by claiming that it is. The telltale sign of the droner is that there is nothing in the movement of his sentences that suggests he cares or is aware of his audience. The droner goes on unexplained tangents. He repeats himself, sometimes making the same obvious and irrelevant point in twelve different ways. He introduces ancillary information or considerations. Whatever the source of his monologue, he simply does not care about whether his audience is with him or not. He’s in his own head, and if he’s thinking about you at all, it’ll take the form of an assumption that you’re right there, in his head, gliding along with him down the Danube River.

Second, there are the first-year graduate students. These people aren’t necessarily first-year graduate students; some of them are professors at Ivy League schools. They are people who still suffer and savor their memories of that first year of graduate school, when everyone is completely intimidated by the knowledge of their professors or peers, not their knowledge of the subject matter, but their knowledge of The Literature. That is, what people have said about the subject matter (sort of). And these people think to themselves, oh, if only one day, I too could have read everything in The Literature (or at least credibly pretend to have read everything), and flatten my antagonist by citing this debate, or that authority, and watch her flail in fear because she doesn’t know the text or the debate. Wouldn’t that be delicious? And even if I’m not coming down on an antagonist, wouldn’t it be awesome to glide through life, like the Droner on the Danube, dispensing little bits of erudition as if it were knowledge?

(Short personal story: When I was first getting started as a professor at Brooklyn College, I attended a conference, where a senior scholar told me over drinks that in order for me to be successful, I needed to hide my arguments beneath heaping servings of “erudition, erudition, erudition.” Those were her exact words. I still remember it as a painful and embarrassing moment where this extraordinarily eminent professor revealed herself to be that first-year graduate student I’m talking about here. This is also how I feel about the Straussians. Whether it’s Harvey Mansfield or a Twitter troll, they all exhibit that desperate thirstiness of the student looking to impress the professor or intimidate his opponents by erudition, erudition, erudition. It never works.)

The last type is the confused word saladist. The confused may come by their confusion honestly; they’ve tried to wrestle with the text or a body of literature, and they still don’t understand it. I’ve certainly been in that position many times, particularly when it comes to new areas of scholarship I’m entering (as I have been in these last few years with my book on capitalism). Nothing wrong with confusion. What I do when I’m confused is to try and state what I think I know is correct, what I am uncertain about, and then ask people for help. And listen. I’ve posted many such posts on social media that express that confusion. Again, nothing wrong with it.

The confusionists I’m talking about are the ones who don’t know what they don’t know. These are the word saladists, who don’t express their confusion; they enact it. They don’t enact honestly; they express their confusion with great confidence. Usually, let’s be honest, these are men. Not always, but often. These are commenters who express nothing but the muddle of their own minds, and where some confused people can at least give you an indication of where the muddle lies, the confusionists spew so much word salad that you can’t even begin to sort through the leaves, where any amount of confusion may be hiding. These people make you work and sweat to try to get to the bottom of their confusion, but they show no appreciation of or interest in your work and sweat. They just keep swimming in their salad.

Those are three types of commenters; there are many more.

Why do I read them as privileged? It’s not because they’re men, who have privilege by virtue of being men. Some are often women. It’s not because they’re professors. Many of them are not. It’s not because they’re white or cis or straight; again, many are not (at least in my experience).

It’s because they are indifferent to their audience. They speak without giving any sense that there is a person at the other end of the conversation. They don’t see you. They don’t register your presence.

Again, I want to distinguish this point from the problem of the Droner—that is, I want to distinguish someone who goes on at length, honestly, from someone who drones on. And I’ll be honest, it’s because I’m aware that I often write at length, which can indicate an indifference to audience. But if you do read me, I think you get a pretty clear sense that I’m aware of you, not in your specificity, necessarily, but aware of you as a reader, with limited time and patience for other people’s prose. I try to keep things moving along, I try not to test your endurance, I try to be aware of when I’m droning, or sliding down a tangent. I edit my work, trying to trim all excess. I proofread it, so you don’t get stuck on a silly error of mine. And I try to engage you. I know that I won’t engage everyone; that’s the nature of things. But I try to engage you, whoever you are that’s still reading this, at this point.

I come by that desire honestly, I think. I’m not desperate for eyeballs on the page or followers. I don’t dumb things down, I don’t go for that cheap form of academic popularization that you see all over the internet, I try to stick to my own beliefs in a debate, even if they are unpopular (see fascism debate).

But when I say that I care about the reader, I mean that I’m aware of another human being opposite me. I consider that person not merely my equal, but also my partner. I care about what they think, what their experience is of my writing. Sometimes I think they’re wrong, other times I think they’re on to something. The point is, I see them, I’m aware of them, I’m writing for them, I’m thinking about them.

The droner, the first-year grad student, and the word saladist/confusionist: They don’t see other people. The first-year grad student gets the closest to other people, insofar as they’re trying to impress and parade their reading. But they’re not actually aware of other people as persons. They’re obsessed with their own experience of anxiety and intimidation, which they project on to other people. Other people are merely a screen of their own selves.

None of these types make for good writing. Not because they lack talent or knowledge. But because they lack awareness of the most basic other, the person who’s reading this page. They simply don’t care. And that is a form of privilege.

The review may be behind the paywall, so if you cannot access it, you can sign up for a subscription to the magazine or email me (corey.robin@gmail.com), and I can send you a pdf.

In the meantime, here are some excerpts from the review.

From the first part:

They were, Beckert tells us, “the world’s first capitalists.”

By using this nomenclature, Beckert makes three claims. Two look backward, one looks forward, and none of them stands up to scrutiny. First, he writes that these merchants pioneered a new form of economic being. They “led economic lives based upon a truly exotic principle: They deployed capital to produce more capital. The accumulation of capital was the linchpin of their worldly endeavors.” But that principle was neither novel nor exotic, and Beckert’s merchants were not the first to act on it. Aristotle saw it lurking in any form of money-based, long-distance trade, and he was sufficiently concerned about its currency among the merchants of his day that he devoted several pages of his Politics to denouncing it and them.

Second, Beckert claims that these merchants forged a “global connectedness.” It’s not clear what he means here, as he allows that this connectedness did not extend to the Americas. He can’t mean that the merchants connected three of the world’s seven continents, unless he attaches a special, and undisclosed, meaning to continents—or to the number three. He might mean the connections forged across vast distances: Beckert regularly toggles between “long-distance trade,” “long-distance merchants,” and “capitalist,” and writes that “capitalism’s mainspring was its capacity to connect distant places.” But this also was not new: Ancient trading routes in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea spanned distances that were equivalent to those separating Javanese merchants from the Banda Islands or Khmer merchants from China, two instances of global connectedness that Beckert cites. And if what matters to him are the connections forged across social or cultural differences—he often resorts to the phrase “connected diversity”—we would do well to recall that Plato was so alarmed by the cosmopolitan effects of trade on his ideal city that he insisted on siting its port miles away from its people.

Last, though Beckert is careful to say that these merchants were “capitalists without capitalism,” he insists that they built “islands of capital” upon which “capitalism originated.” Beckert’s merchants were the “vanguard,” the “avant-garde,” the “central actors,” “seedlings,” “sprouts,” and “harbingers” of the “capitalist revolution” to come. As the slippage from vanguard to harbinger suggests, Beckert never settles on, much less sustains, a specific historical claim about these merchants, whose “revolutionary importance,” he allows, may be “visible only in retrospect.” Even so, Beckert flies the flag of a school of scholars who assign a causal pride of place to the medieval merchants of the Muslim world.

Beckert distinguishes this origin story from that of a competing school of scholars who situate the beginnings of capitalism in the struggles between landlords and tenant farmers in Britain during the late medieval and early modern eras, and he argues that these scholars mistakenly see capitalism originating in “one place” rather than “in the connections between various places.” But that only returns us to the question of what Beckert has in mind when he speaks of connections, distances, and places. Why are the connections between merchants in Cairo and Canton, who Beckert says “would have been broadly recognizable to one another” and whose “ways of conducting business would have been familiar across geographic and cultural divides,” more connective than those joining a landlord doling out leases to a farmer laboring in his fields in Norfolk? Beckert doesn’t say.

From the second part of the review:

Beckert acknowledges that his claim about the state is nothing new. More than a century ago, Max Weber coined the phrase “political capitalism” to describe what he called “that memorable alliance between the rising states” of Europe and “the sought-after and privileged capitalist powers.” What Beckert does provide is a wealth of carefully plotted detail showing how these alliances were made and unmade, across four centuries, in place after place: from men on the Italian peninsula to states on the Iberian peninsula that pushed the forces of political capitalism down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, and into the Americas; in the Dutch Republic, which pushed those forces into the Baltic Sea, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia; and in England, which pushed them everywhere.

Beckert also acknowledges that the owners of capital transformed agricultural production, turning agricultural labor into a commodity and creating a vast market in labor in the countryside. The “radical innovation” of the capitalist was to seize or control labor “as the primary source of value in trade.” Though Beckert’s language couldn’t be clearer—the transformation of agricultural production, with its identification of labor as a key source of value, is the “foundry” of capitalism—he doesn’t appear to recognize its significance for the other claims he makes throughout the book or make any attempt to reconcile them. Contrary to what Beckert sometimes says, his book shows that capitalism does not begin with trade and long-distance connection. It does not arise from merchants behaving like merchants. It does not follow from accumulations of wealth. It begins with capital’s taking control of production and unlocking workers’ highly prized and protected capacity for labor.

From the third part:

Hobsbawm’s dual revolution set off a centuries-long contest between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. Beckert, by contrast, largely narrates a story of unfolding continuity in which the “war capitalism” that spawned plantation slavery in the 16th century matures into the “industrial capitalism,” imperialism, and fascism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Beckert may claim that the Haitian Revolution “dealt a massive blow to the slavery system” and “set in motion a century of political upheaval.” He may discuss the struggles of workers, free and enslaved, and anticolonial nationalists that the Haitian Revolution heralded. He may write that “there was a world before the Industrial Revolution and an entirely different one after it.” But as we learned long ago: Trust the tale, not the teller.

From the last part:

As a historian, Beckert is blessed with gifts. Not only has he amassed an enormous archive of material, but he also mines it to maximal effect. He zooms in and out of the microscopic and the macroscopic with great ease. Every chapter opens with a set piece of such variousness and detail—the merchant city of Surat in western India, the island of Barbados in 1646, La Réunion after 1848, the linen industry in southwestern Poland, the Röchling family in Germany, a strike of Senegalese railway workers in 1919, the Fiat factory in Turin, the typewriter in postwar India—that it almost carries the reader past the analytical confusion he sows along the way. Like his merchants, Beckert is a wonderful maker of lists; each item pops off the page. Centuries of the past and places of the present, which among other scholars of capitalism can merge into a blur, remain as distinct as the different grades of school are to a student and as singular as a neighborhood block is to a walker in the city.

As a writer, Beckert is less blessed.

You can read the whole essay here. I hope you will!