We were spared the spectacle of heat domes and wildfires except for a brief spell of smoke from Canada. And that we could forgive because Mark Carney and Doug Ford are better adversaries of Trump than the decrepit leadership of the Democratic Party. (Ford is the premier of Ontario who told Trump to kiss his ass, and refused to apologize for the remark when later pressed by reporters.)

Still, every day brings a more bizarre bit of news. Trump is increasingly deranged, of course, and every time Stephen Miller is loosed on the public you know that only inexhaustible hatred of the world could drive a man to say what he does with such sneering, sometimes even sonorous invective. The war on Iran continues, the bond market keeps buckling, the stock market keeps rising—and so do the prices of everything else, except eggs.

We are marooned in the fantasies that sustain the Trump regime, among them that the war continues only because Iran won’t abide by its commitments, that oil from Venezuela owned by the Pentagon will bring gas prices down, that the US military is not in total disarray due to Pete Hegseth’s purges, and that the midterms will be conducted in accordance with constitutional scruple, legal precedent, proper decorum.

Ha. Or, well, duh. What is the point of commentary if all it does is amplify the obvious? I’ve been asking myself this question because some of my friends have given up entirely on the news, and don’t want to hear my summaries and interpretations of it. What is to be done?

It’s hard to fall back on faith, the “conviction of things unseen.” But for now all I got is a.residual belief in the American people—in their capacity to do the right thing within the limits imposed on their range of choice. Blind faith, by now? We’ll see.

____________

SEPTEMBER 3. I just read Arnon Grunberg’s harrowing interview of Omer Bartov at Boston Review. Bartov is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University (formerly my colleague at Rutgers in History). His most recent book is Israel: What Went Wrong?, which wasn’t published in Germany and Israel because, Bartov told Grunberg, “You are not allowed to say anything bad about the Jews. That is one thing Germans and Jews agree on.”

I call it harrowing because Bartov, a former IDF officer, makes no excuses and uses no euphemisms when describing Israel’s conduct. He calls Zionism in its present incarnation a form of racism. But he doesn’t think the die was cast until the composition and ratification of a constitution that guaranteed equal rights to Arabs and Jews alike were postponed indefinitely—so that the new state could continue its war against resident Arabs. Still, here is what he says toward the end of the interview. (Spoiler Alert: Bartov does indeed express serious doubts about Israel’s right to exist.)

“But the time when Israel had a blank check to kill in the name of the Holocaust is over. One genocide cannot be used to legitimize another. The Zionism that still exists today is a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy, and that ideology, like the ideologies of the twentieth century, must end up in the dustbin of history.

“Israel will have to reinvent itself. Whether it will be a Jewish state is not so important. There will be many Jews living there. It is profoundly sad that eighty years after the end of the genocide from which Israel emerged, the country has become so violent, vulgar, and indifferent, even toward its own citizens.

“The moral abyss is real, and it is an abyss all Jews are confronted with, if only because Israel claims to speak on behalf of all Jews.”

SEPTEMBER 2. The question in this headline [Are Centrist Democrats Too Racist?] is both startling and misleading, but not because so-called centrist Democrats are not sabotaging the party’s chances at majorities in both Houses of Congress. Ryan Cooper’s point here is not that Islamophobia will damage El-Sayed’s candidacy; it is instead that insofar as criticism of Zionism is assumed to be a species of anti-semitism, the progressive wing of the party will be treated by centrists as a diseased limb requiring anesthesia and/or amputation. There’s racism at work here, to be sure, but it faces a different direction than what we expect from the charge. https://prospect.org/.../are-centrist-democrats-too.../?

SEPTEMBER 2. The Economist is not the only reputable publication that is noticing a nervous bond market. Long-term investments carry more risk when expectations of profit are countermanded by political uncertainty, or outright vandalism of the kind Trump has made the Republican brand of governing.

Under these circumstances, the very serious people, the deficit hawks, the so-called fiscal conservatives—and this species thrives in both parties—always call for “balancing the budget” by means of spending cuts.

Why not go to the heart of the problem, and acknowledge that it’s the supply side that needs our attention? Why not tell the truth, say that the real problem is federal revenue, which has been severely reduced by tax cuts on corporate income since Reagan, always on the grounds that this will lead to higher profits, thus more investment, more jobs, faster growth, blah, blah, blah.

It’s never worked out that way—ever. Higher profits have meant more speculation, more frequent economic crises, more misery on Main Street.

And now ,when the affordability crisis can only get worse as food prices rise in accordance with shortages of fertilizer (see: Hormuz) and gasoline gets more expensive because refinery capacity has shrunk (see: war on Iran), corporate profits have soared.

Tax the rich! Is there another choice?

AUGUST 30. “’This election should be about affordability and Trump’s corruption, and they want to make it about Jews and Israel,’ Mr. Gottheimer said.” That’s NYT reporting today on progressive objections to the Dem leadership’s designation of Jared Moskowitz (FL) as the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, along with two other “staunchly pro-Israel” members, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL) and Wesley Bell (MO).

Notice that Gottheimer’s “centrist” complaint makes no sense unless you grant him three assumptions. First, that the conflation of Jews and Israel, which makes all diasporic Jews somehow responsible for state violence to which they have not given their consent, is legitimate. This assumption is not only anti-semitic, it is also the intellectual groundwork of terrorism, which refuses any distinction between rulers and ruled, leaders and inhabitants, combatants and non-combatants, in waging asymmetric war on oppressors.

Second, that affordability and Trump’s corruption are to be understood as domestic issues only, not dimensions of US foreign affairs. This assumption erases the role of the war on Iran in raising prices on everything—because insanity and uncertainly impose real costs—and meanwhile forgets the financial burden of so-called defense spending (see: bond market). It also ignores Trump’s wholly corrupt self-dealing in the Middle East by means of his idiot son-in-law.

Third, that “they”—the Democrats who object to appointing a uniformly pro-Israel politician to leadership of a crucial subcommittee—are some lunatic fringe of the party. In fact, 75-80% of Democrats as such oppose additional economic and/or military aid to Israel, as the NYT reports in the same article. It is Jeffries, Gottheimer, Moskowitz, Bell, et al., who compose the extreme wing of a party that is finally questioning the dangerous liaison between the US and Israel.

AUGUST 27. I played (American) football for six years, seven if you count two truncated stints in college. Was knocked unconscious only once, but did a lot of head-banging as a fullback, a corner, and a linebacker. My little brother played eight full seasons, high school and college, defensive end and linebacker. It was just what a guy did. We probably scrambled our brains.

In any case, the new study of CTE in the NFL surely understates the prevalence of brain damage suffered by pro football players. If the ratio of brains damaged to brains examined held for all 878 of the deceased players, it would be 90%, not 25%. Here’s the NYT:

“The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of the 878 former players who died in that time period [2016-2021], or 24.5 percent, had C.T.E. But because researchers could obtain only 235 brains, the actual prevalence could be far higher.”

Uh, yeah, could be.

AUGUST 26. Has race always been at the heart of American political discourse? Insofar as it is the form that the sublimation of class struggle has taken, most definitely. But in a larger sense?

I'm reminded of this question just now by a startling declaration from Joe Scarborough at 6:15 AM. The execution of Alex Pretti represents “the return of Jim Crow,” he exclaims, because the deed was done in secret, with no recourse to justice. What he means, I think, is that white people are no—-incredibly—subject to the lawless violence of both "non-state actors" and agents of the state, as Black people have been since slavery was codified in the late-17th century.

He means that Trump's fascist regime has universalized the logic of Jim Crow. It is now color blind, in uncanny accordance with the principles of liberalism as John Roberts has enunciated them. The pathetic ironies of this moment are almost too obvious.

AUGUST 25. This is the best summary I've seen of what has changed for good in the Middle East. If we assume the author is within range of being right about the past and the present, the future of the region looks unstable at best, because (1) neither Iran nor Israel can hereafter be constrained by the US, and (2) the autocratic regimes of the region are now on their own in suppressing or defusing domestic unrest and opposition.

P.S. Have I mentioned that Osama bin Laden's most urgent demand has been met by the dismantling of US military bases on the Arabian peninsula?

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/.../end-american-middle...?

AUGUST 24. Let me belabor the obvious. Trump has no cards left to play. Bessent can’t shore up the bond market, because the president’s feckless, random, stupid policies (the tariffs, the war, the tax cuts, etc.) have convinced the world that there are safer bets.

It’s not a flight from US Treasuries yet, but demand for them has flattened at the very moment the Trump regime wants to spend $1.5 trillion on the military.

Meanwhile, most Americans can’t make ends meet..And the Fed has no incentive and no means to reduce rates (so that the housing market might be stimulated) because even higher inflation now impends.

Trump can’t open the strait because military force hasn’t worked and will not work against Iran, and he can’t impose sanctions against Iran’s trading partners, no matter what name for them he cooks up to describe their supposed effects. (China is one of those partners)

All he can do is hope that he can cause enough chaos—and that Stephen Miller can suppress enough votes—to prevent Democratic control of the Senate as well as the House. John Roberts has just lent them a hand.

AUGUST 22. Go ahead, call Mark Carney a banker, a technocrat, a stiff. At least he says what we’re all thinking about Trump, and he gets to say it loudly enough for all to hear. In French.

I mean, this buffoon actually thinks that tariffs are good for America, and that poisoning relationships with our closest neighbors and allies is how you exert world leadership.

Among other insanities. How can anybody believe this bloated pig of a person has anything on his mind apart from more money and more power for himself and his idiot offspring? OK, pardons for the felons who aid and abet him.

Yeah, ho-fucking-hum, business as usual at the White House.

Trita Parsi measures the toll. Somebody has to.https://tritaparsi.substack.com/.../why-so-many-countries...?

AUGUST 19. When centrists like Andy Beshear say intra-party differences are healthy, and are nothing compared to the differences between Democrats and Republicans, then go onto declare that the issues are hunger, health care, and inequality, that is when you know the DSA has broken through, no matter what James Carville, Matt Yglesias, and the twits at Third Way are saying.

Bernie’s heirs have changed the discourse, for good.

It’s been said before, blah, blah, but this really is a turning point, a midterm without precedent. I don’t see how Trump and his cronies survive without taking drastic measures. They see it the same So expect the worst from them—and the best from the rest of us.

I

Doug Henwood, a stalwart of the Left from the socialist republic of Brooklyn, has recently accomplished what I thought was impossible or unnecessary—he has revisited and restated the Anti-Federalist case against the US Constitution. (Full disclosure: Doug is a personal acquaintance for whom I have the utmost admiration.)

https://jacobin.com/2026/07/an-aristocracy-by-design

This is a habit the Left indulges too frequently, mainly because it can. For it is only here in the US that the losers, deviants, miscreants, and malcontents get to write the history books that matter, and not as exiles like Leon Trotsky or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If “America” is exceptional in any meaningful sense, that is how. Don’t take my word for it. Ask yourself why the Lost Cause of the Confederacy enjoyed at least a century of legitimacy, indeed hegemony, in the textbooks, or why the Populists of the 1890s remain the darlings of historians on the Left, and you will have the rudiments of an explanation for this exceptional intellectual phenomenon.

You will also understand why the Anti-Federalists seem to have carried the day, even unto this day, and on the Right as well as the Left. The products of the Federalist Society (!) who sit on the Supreme Court, for example, are unapologetically bent on a return to the pre-Constitutional state—it was not yet a nation—created by the Articles of Confederation.

Henwood takes to the pages of Jacobin to make the case against the so-called Founders. (see the link above). It’s an appropriate setting because under the spell of Robespierre, the Jacobins proved that when the project of revolution is reduced to radicalism—to the repudiation, indeed the erasure, of the past—it inevitably fails. Since Lenin and the Bolsheviks became the exemplary figures for the Left (and their antagonists became “revisionists”), the French Revolution has almost invariably appeared as the paradigm of revolution as such But the fact is that the French rendition of revolution sputtered to an ignominious end with The Terror, then the Bourbon Restoration, to be followed by a series of ragtag republics, clownish regimes, and abortive rebellions which finally expired with a whimper in 1940.

The American Revolution, by contrast, was a huge success by any measure, including the kind that would have us treat (progress toward) democracy as the essential criterion. It wasn’t a proletarian revolution, mind you, so the role of the working class—a social stratum that wasn’t the majority of Americans until the late 19th century, in any evnt—is irrelevant to its making, and to its interpretation (except as noted below).

And it is of course true that the so-called founders were wary of democracy, but largely because they still thought about historical time in the terms bequeathed them by civic republicanism, as a cyclical movement that made tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy moments on a rotating wheel that never unfolded to become a linear, cumulative development (hence “revolution” meant something like what R stands for in RPM, a turning that repeats as long as the energy source is animated).

II

Henwood nevertheless urges us not merely to ignore the legacy of the Revolution, but to repudiate it. In keeping with longstanding historiographical tradition on the Left, however, he assumes that the radicalism of the the revolution was repressed and mutilated by the Constitutional settlement of 1787-90. The generic narrative that follows from that assumption, a master text in its own right, goes like this:

From 1774 to 1787, the American Revolution was a de-centered, radical event driven by The People “out of doors,“ a motley, unwashed crew known variously as “the crowd,” committees of privates, Sons of Liberty, or “the mob,” and typically led by artisans like Sam Adams in Boston and/or itinerant n’er do wells like Tom Paine in Philadelphia. (The merchants who led the early stages of rebellion, ca. 1765-1771, had by then retreated from an increasingly diverse and unruly revolutionary coalition bent on independence from British rule, but also determined to wrest power from colonial elites.)

The new state constitutions written and ratified by this Leveller-like constituency were remarkably popular, in both senses—in Pennsylvania, for example, which was then the largest state, the constitution of 1776 (which Paine helped draft) abolished property qualifications for the vote and installed a unicameral legislature, to be balanced by a rotating council of censors that would pronounce on the merits of the laws it passed.

Other states didn’t go as far, but in almost every case the powers of the executive branch were strictly limited, the demographic reach of the electorate was considerably broadened, and the resultant legislatures looked much more like the whole of the people they represented (with the obvious exceptions, women and slaves; but free black men did, in fact, vote on the state constitutions and, later, ratification). The revolutionary war was financed and conducted by the states, with only secondary assistance from the Continental Congress—basically, it printed money—which, like the “United States” created by the Articles of Confederation in 1783, had neither mandate nor statutory authority to tax state revenues, imported goods, or individuals.

In such perspective, the Thermidor of the American Revolution—the conservative, nationalist counter-revolution against the Articles that triumphed with the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789 and was then enacted by Alexander Hamilton’s financial revolution—began in the mid-1780s, the “critical period,” when doubts about an “elective despotism,” which is to say doubts about majority rule, became a commonplace in all media, from the pulpits and the pamphlets to the broadsheets and the newspapers. In such perspective, the Constitution betrayed the radicalism of the revolution by removing the scene of sovereignty from the states to the nation.

III

I say that Henwood recapitulates this narrative even though he doesn’t bother with a capsule history of the period. For his criticism of the Revolution boils down to complaints against the undemocratic dimensions of the Constitution—and his indictment of the so-called Founders treats James Madison as the central figure in the making of the Constitution.

Fair enough. Let’s retrace Madison’s intellectual itinerary, to see what original intent actually was, implies, and still promises. Note, to begin with, that he was not a radical, even though he finally decided that the past had nothing left to teach him and his comrades about the making and the maintenance of republics. Note, more importantly, that his assumptions about the moral and political capacities of propertyless proletarians were widely shared in late-18th century North America, across all social strata. Just about eveyone knew that wage-earners were self-evidently dependent on their employers. If they became the majority, they would be ruled not by themselves but by those with more resources.

But look, before we can grasp the meaning of any revolution, we have to understand that democracy and majority rule are not the same thing, If they were, the states of the Jim Crow South, ca. 1890-1970, were democratic polities. There can be no doubt that the Senate, especially as hamstrung by the filibuster, urgently needs reform, or that the Electoral College is an ugly anachronism; but neither can there be any doubt that an amended Constitution is a better solution to our contemporary political impasse than a return to the Articles of Confederation, as the Supreme Court now demands, and as the Left has proposed, implicitly or explicitly, for roughly a century.

On, then, to Madison’s itinerary.

In early 1787, having made a detailed study of republics ancient and modern, he wrote a memo to himself called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” This was a long rough draft of the famous Federalist #10. Here he worried about the multiplicity, the mutability, and the injustice of the laws passed by the various states under the diplomatic compact called the Articles of Confederation. But the big problem was the will of the people itself—an “elective despotism,” as Thomas Jefferson himself put it in 1783.

“If the multiplicity and mutability of laws prove a want of wisdom, their injustice betrays a defect still more alarming: more alarming not merely because it is a greater evil in itself, but because it brings more into question the fundamental question of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such Governments, are the safest Guardians both of public Good and of private rights.” [my italics]

Madison believed in the sovereignty of the people as the sine qua non of republican government. But he assumed that the defense of majority rule, and with it the possibility of a legitimate exercise of state power, required a logic that wasn’t circular—a logic that didn’t justify the power of the state, as expressed in law, by reference to power as such, in this instance the power of numbers.

In sum, Madison knew that a majority could be as despotic as any tyrant. What was to be done? How to contain or combat this despotic potential and thus preserve the substance and legitimacy of popular government? Neither a “prudent regard” for the common good nor “respect for character”—for elite opinion—was adequate, according to Madison. But piety was no help, either, because, like other “passions,” it could easily inflame oppressive majorities.

“The conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, the strongest of religious ties, proves that individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them under the like sanction, separately in their closets. When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other Passions, is increased by the sympathy of a multitude.”

So, the way to establish a republic on enduring foundations was not to prevent but to prolong the process of majority formation, to devise, as Madison put it, “such a modification of the Sovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the different interests and factions.”

IV

In place of prudence and character and piety—instead of respect for elite opinion and its attendant hierarchies—Madison proposed, then, to put the structural constraints of a constitution. By this I don’t mean only that he proposed a “limited government” circumscribed by rights guaranteed to individuals, or prerogatives reserved to the states (the Bill of Rights), as enforced by a judiciary that recognized the federalist separation of powers.

Of course he did. I mean also that his constitutional design, his “modification of the Sovereignty,” inscribed a difference, and a debate, between what he called “the two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons and the rights of property.”

It did so by adopting a “middle mode” through which the legislative branch was divided against itself, and each house became the effective voice of one of those “cardinal objects.” In this sense, Madison proposed to enlist historical time as the bulwark of justice in a society that would inevitably be riven by the differences between what he called “the Class with, and the Class without property”—he proposed to indefinitely prolong the debate between the social classes that had already appeared, in the 18th century, as the bearers of these different rights.

The class without property would defend the rights of persons in and through the lower house of the legislatures, including the Congress itself. The class that possessed it would defend the rights of property in the upper house. But both houses would be subject to periodic electoral discovery and pressure.

In a critique of Jefferson’s draft of a constitution for Virginia, Madison explained the historical grounds for this division of labor.

“This middle mode reconciles and secures the two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property. The former will be sufficiently guarded by one branch, the latter more particularly by the other. Give all power to property, and the indigent will be oppressed. Give it the latter and the effect may be transposed. Give a defensive share to each and each will be secure. The necessity of thus guarding the rights of property was for obvious reasons unattended to in the commencement of the Revolution.”

V

All previous republics had collapsed because they could not balance “the two cardinal objects of Government,” the rights of persons and the rights of property. The great secret divulged by the history of republican government, Madison had found, was that there was nothing left to learn from that history. Except this: Either the rights of persons would be protected from the power of property, or the new American experiment would perish along with all the other attempts at government of, by, and for the people.

“In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots & lawgivers the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich. In the existing state of American population & American property, the two classes of rights were so little discriminated that a provision for the rights of persons was supposed to include of itself those of property, and it was natural to infer from the tendency of republican laws, that these different interests would be more and more identified. [my emphases]

“Experience and investigation have however produced more correct ideas on the subject.”

In other words, the study of history had forced a complete departure from classical and modern republican theory, Aristotle to Montesquieu. As he said in the constitutional convention on June 19, 1787, “According to the Republican theory indeed, Right & power being both vested in the majority, are held to be synonymous. According to fact & experience, a minority may in an appeal to force be an overmatch for the majority.”

He continued:

“It is now observed that in all populous countries, the smaller part only can be interested in preserving the rights of property. It must be foreseen that America, and Kentucky itself will by degrees arrive at this stage of Society, that is some parts of the Union, a very great advance is already made towards it “

Kentucky was shorthand for the most verdant lands on the trans-Appalachian frontier, a new Garden of Eden. If even that horizon was now clouded by class formation and the conflicts that came with it, then attending to the future of the republic was the urgent business of the present.

“It is well understood that interest leads to injustice as well where the opportunity is presented in bodies of men as to individuals; to an interested majority in a Republic, as to the interested minority in any other form of Government. The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution, and in the present state of population when the bulk of the people have a sufficient interest in possession or in prospect to be attached to the rights of property, without being insufficiently attached to the rights of persons. Liberty not less than justice pleads for the policy here recommended.

“If all power be suffered to slide into hands not interested in the rights of property which must be the case whenever a majority fall under that description, one of two things cannot fail to happen; either they will unite against the other description and become the dupes & instruments of ambition, or their poverty & dependence will render them the necessary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”

Notice that Madison doesn’t express fear of a proletarian revolution. Instead, he assumes that a propertyless majority would be the abject instruments of great ambition or great wealth. To be sure, this paragraph sounds like a Platonic prophecy, an acknowledgement that democracy was a dead end—except that Madison never doubted that majority rule was the necessary if not the sufficient condition of popular government. In the Constitutional convention, on June 26, 1787, for example, he said this:

“An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who labor under all the hardships of life & secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are [placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. How is this danger to be guarded against on republican principles?”

In other words, how to preserve both liberty and equality? How to treat both the rights of property and the rights of persons as commensurable commitments? How to embrace majority rule without enabling an “elective despotism”?

Unlike some of his cohort, Madison never thought that a “natural aristocracy” of well-educated men with good character—an elite—could contain or guide the unruly energies of the proletarian masses. He always believed that the constitutional structures he designed would convert passions to interests, and that insofar as economic development created more and more interests, an oligarchy founded on corruption was unlikely if not impossible.

VI

He was wrong. An oligarchy founded on corruption has arrived, without apology. Every day it sacrifices the poor to the rich with impunity, pretending that the highest possible morality still attaches to the disgusting morbidity residing in the pursuit of profit.

But that is no reason to relinquish Madison’s insights into republican government and the democratic possibilities that flow from it. The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were moments on a continuum, as he understood them, and as Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimke, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer did as well. Promissory notes, MLK called them.

Once again, they’ve come due. We can redeem them, but only if we realize that the radicalism of the American Revolution was both annulled and preserved in the Constitutional settlement. Like the principal of a long-term investment, the principle remains. And so does the interest, Doug.

JUNE 24. The Rising Tide of Socialism? I keep saying that a majority of Americans want what Bernie, AOC, Zohran, et al., have been proposing as practical, affordable solutions to the failure of capitalism to deliver the goods, including the public goods of liberty and equality.

NYC is not exceptional in this sense, not any more than the USA is an exception to the historical logics that apply to other nations. Both are, rather, harbingers, heralds of what is to come--a promise, if you will, that only we, the people, can keep.

Mamdani emerged last night as the kind of “kingmaker” we need to change the Democratic Party “from the bottom up”—as against the existing leadership, which can’t muster anything but “concern” over Trump’s violations of laws, principles, norms, and basic human decency because it can’t see that without larger doses of socialism, democracy has no future.

Meanwhile, the Working Families Party commissioned a poll of working-class people on AI. Here’s the key graf, from TNR:

“Huge majorities, 80 percent and more, want government support for retraining and education programs for those who lose jobs due to AI. They want regulations requiring corporations to give notice before replacing jobs with AI, and to be taxed to contribute to these programs. They also want to share in any benefits from AI through increased pay, shorter workweeks, and stronger benefits. Seventy-three percent agreed with this statement: ‘AI should work for working people, not just make billionaires richer while everyone else worries about losing their job.’”

JUNE 23. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are interviewed this morning at "Morning Joe," on the day their Regime Change is published. A massive does of anecdotes illustrating what we already know, that the man in the White House is incredibly ignorant as well as stupid—he is, practically speaking, illiterate—and that his circle has absolute faith in his infallibility or in what has the same effect, his limitless thirst for aggrandizement or revenge.

So what else is new? One thing. These people know they are under siege because they know the vast majority of Americans would find their agenda repugnant if the contents of that agenda were revealed in full, or merely in plain speech. The Plot Against America is stranger than fiction. But it is very real.

JUNE 22. What’s the most fitting epitaph for the departed Alan Greenspan? Here rests a faithful follower of the execrable Ayn Rand? Here lies another musician who couldn’t quit the day job? Here resides the author of the phrase that captures the only redeeming feature of late capitalism, “irrational exuberance”? Here putrefies the body of the Fed chairman whose policies enabled “collateral debt obligations,” the Big Short, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? There goes the benighted husband of Andrea Mitchell?

Lest we forget, I would remind you that he was nowhere near as stupid as Marc Andreesen or Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, who think their possessions are the insignia of intelligence; Here’s what Greenspan said in his memoir, Turbulent Years (2007), p. 461:

“Remember, markets are not ends in themselves. They are constructs to assist populations in achieving the optimum allocation of resources.”

Translation: Markets aren’t an external reality to which we must adjust, they’re social constructs that we, the people, can put to use in making sure that resources of every kind are produced and distributed safely, efficiently, productively, and equitably. I read it as a rationale for piutting socialism to work in reconstructing markets, so that they serve the purpose of democracy rather than the bottom lines of billionaires and their attendants. On good days, when I’m feeling optimistic, I read it as the slogan we need to create an American version of perestroika.

JUNE 22. OK, so I watch "Morning Joe," but then I also listen to "Know Your Enemy"—pretty boring, as a rule—and read the NYT alongside other mainstream periodicals. I continue to be astonished (and encouraged) by the leftward drift of that mainstream. This morning, for example, Bob Odenkirk came on "Joe" to plug the revival of a play based on transcripts of HUAC hearings. The introductory remarks noted that Roy Cohn mentored both Roger Stone and Donald Trump; the ensuing discussion reached the conclusion that HUAC itself was engaged in the most un-American activities imaginable.

Liberal guilt, you might say, or the domestication of the Popular Front on the grounds that it did, in fact, protect and even promote bourgeois (parliamentary) democracy. I think it signifies the impossibility of renewing anything like a Red Scare, as Stephen Miller and his boss like to think they're doing with constant references to Antifa and "radical left lunatics." As AOC said on the might Mamdani won, they've been calling us socialists for 20 years now, who cares? What difference has it made?

JUNE 20. Under Trump, the US simply cannot be taken seriously as a world power. The new closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran is a direct response to Israel's violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon (100 airstrikes since midnight)—that is, it's a way of announcing that either Trump disciplines his "partner" in the Middle East, or Iran will impose the penalties it can on the US, and on the world economy.

The problem here is that Netanyahu can't be brought to heel: he has no choice, because even the Israeli opposition is against the MOU. So the question becomes, can Trump make the only choice available to him if he means what he says, that the purpose of the MOU is to stave off a global economic catastrophe? Can he not just threaten to cut Israel off from US economic and military aid, but actually follow through?

JUNE 18. Trump, it is said, becomes more obsessed with his “legacy” every day. This word grants unearned dignity to what he seeks, which is the childish satisfaction of naming, and as he thinks possessing, the objects that come within the narrow compass of his stunted purview. And so he fears being identified with, named after, the losers of history—among them, the Republican president Herbert Hoover, who was driven from office in disgrace by the Great Depression.

That is why Trump surrendered unconditionally to Iran. As he explained at yesterday’s press conference, it was either surrender or be blamed by voters now and hereafter for causing a comparable disaster. Opening the Strait of Hormuz under ANY conditions was his goal once it became clear that not even overwhelming military force would bend Iran’s regime to his will. Here is how he put it:

“The one thing I didn’t want to see was economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened. . . You know, I’ve studied presidents. The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. . . . Rather than possibly going into a depression, rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover, we made this deal.”

JUNE 17. Trump achieves the objective of Unconditional Surrender. Except that the US did the surrendering, pretty much unconditionally. Iran "reiterates" its promised renunciation of a nuclear weapon in the MOU. So that was never the issue. The document stipulates not only the immediate end of sanctions, but $300 billion in reconstruction funds for the Islamic Republic of Iran, to be arranged within 60 days. The Strait of Hormuz? Opening under new management. Etc. This makes the loss of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq look like major victories. Can Trump sell this thing, to the Senate, to the MAGA base, to the rest of Americans? I don't see how. But I can't wait for Pete Hegseth's next press conference.

JUNE 16. Today Thomas Edsall looses the zombie wisdom of the consultant class, which claims that black voters—the stalwarts of the Rainbow Colaition—are now more moderate than the white left-liberal faction that keeps pulling the party away from where it should be, dead center. It’s pathetic what these people will say to convince themselves that moderstion in all things is the way to win. Edsall calls on Richard Kohlenberg of the American Identity Center (!?), who claims, against or athwart the available evidence, the following:

“Elections and socialism: In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in D.C., socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.” [NB the mealy-mouthed word “supported'“: it’s like saying some black people voted for so-and-so; also NB who won in D.C.]

To which I say: Oh, please. (1) Not quite. The exit polls in the SC primary showed that the majority of voters favored the candidacy of Biden and the programs of Sanders. In other words, the DNC’s campaign against Bernie worked by claiming he wasn’t “electable.” It did not prove anything about black voters’ attitudes toward socialism in (or out) of an electoral context. (2) Horseshit. NYC’s black voters did not support Cuomo in the primary except by pluralities: the majority of black votes went togther for either Mamdani or Lander. In the general election, Mamdani won substantial majorities of black voters. (3) So what? Older black voters are like older white voters, loathe to desert their traditional loyalties. Younger black voters are like younger white voters, looking left for ideas an programs that might get us out of the mess the Republican Party has made of mere governance.

In Gaucin I was of course reading about the Spanish Civil War, partly because even in this little mountain village, the traces of that deadly struggle are visible, and audible—just as comparable traces are in America. They’re unavoidable. But they’re not just causes for mourning and melancholia. Reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), his account of fighting the fascists with the militia drawn from the 2 million membership of the Confederation National del Trabajo, was refreshing, even inspiring.

It reminded me of what John Adams famously said, that the revolution was “in the minds of the people,” and beyond that of what happens when the forces of production that lie dormant as long as the vast majority of people have no say in deciding the future—the forces of imagination, resourcefulness, local knowledge, courage, and hope—are unleashed.

Think of the hundreds of prophets and pamphlets that appeared as if out of nowhere in the 1640s, then of their followers and readers in the New Model Army, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Ranters, the Anabaptists, and innumerable other sects. Think of the rag-tag winter soldiers who stuck with their colonial militias against all odds once the Declaration of Independence and Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” had been read aloud to them by the officers they had chosen to lead them. Think of the 190,000 former slaves who, having fled to Union lines along with 300,000 of their brothers and sisters, returned to the South as soldiers of the Army of the Republic.

Orwell describes the exhilarating experience of living, fighting, arguing with people who believed they were making a revolution, not merely defending the nascent republic against Franco’s mutiny. We Americans aren’t anywhere near a civil war, except in the rhetorical extremities of the cold war we call the culture war. But are we already at the point “where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism [are] more normal than their opposites,” as Orwell characterizes the structure of feeling at the front with Partido Obrero Unification Marxista? I think we’re close.

In any case, here’s Orwell, from Chapter 7:

“The workers’ militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalising into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in the country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.

“Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working class origin, all living on the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.

“There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. . . . One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship, and not, as in most countries, for humbug. . . . .”

JUNE 13. Look, socialism is not something that comes after The Revolution, as in heavenly life after the death of capitalism, it’s here and now, and not just in the sturdy American tradition of municipal socialism, which Sanders perfected in Burlington and Mamdani represents in NYC. It also exists in the grotesque “personalist” forms Trump has given it, by taking pseudo-public stakes in corporations at the cutting edge of technological innovation.

Either way, left or right, it involves the “socialization” of the means of production and distribution—and among its other aliases, it goes by the name of “economic populism.” That’s what Greg Sargent at The New Republic calls it in this crucial reporting, which demonstrates yet again that substantial majorities of Americans in both red and blue states want pretty much what Bernie has been proposing for ten years.

In short: socialism isn’t utopian, and it sure as hell ain’t pie in the sky. It’s the basic reality of our time. So the only questions worth asking about it are, what kind do we want, and how do we get what we want?

https://newrepublic.com/article/211632/trump-tanking-maga-country-economy?

JUNE 12. The price of oil hasn’t exploded because China has cut its demand, but summer travel will reduce depleted reserves, so come September . . . Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that 15 countries have already applied for $4 billion in loans from the Asian Development Bank to address oil and gas shortages that are—not will be—the direct result of the war on Iran.

And don’t forget that on Wednesday, June 10, before the “deal” Trump announced yesterday, The Economist said this:

“So Mr Trump needs to make a deal with Iran. Forget about anything as good as the pre-war status quo, let alone the deal Barack Obama struck in 2015 to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which Mr Trump tore up.

“The best Mr Trump can hope for is a makeshift pact to reopen the strait in exchange for an extended ceasefire that may, with luck, become permanent. Economic sweeteners will be necessary [$24 billion unfrozen assets to start]. The threat of force will remain.

“Haggling over Iran’s nuclear programme will have to come later. Such a deal would be unstable, and humiliating for America. Yet it would be less bad than any plausible alternative. For all Mr Trump’s plans to erect a triumphal arch in Washington, his war on Iran has cost America dearly.” ■

Well, yeah. But at least the whole world now knows what 70% of Americans do. Taking Trump at his word isn’t just risky—it’s suicidal.

JUNE 11. "I love the inflation." That's the clip I hear first thing on my first morning home, the lede on "Morning Joe." Everybody's laughing about it. Because they watched the Knicks win last night? Or is it because there's nothing more or else to say about this pathetic old man?

Of course he's stupid, venal, corrupt, and careless—he always has been. But we had to take him seriously, once upon a time. No longer: he is simply too ridiculous in all respects, except for the equally pathetic Mike Johnson. But like the NYT itself, the historians it asked to comment on Trump's rendition of presidential history—his captioned hall of plaques—haven't caught up with this tectonic shift. Their tone suggests that the occupant of the Whie House is still altogether there, or, what is worse, that the political universe that should have elected Hillary Clinton is still intact.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/10/us/politics/trump-president-plaques-white-house.html?

JUNE 9. Farewell to Gaucin. Long lunch yesterday at Restaurante Valdivia (sign above), which is off the road to Cortes de la frontera and down the road from what we call the motorcycle bar on the road to Ronda. As we get ready to leave, I think of what George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia, having fought Franco in Aragon and Barcelona with Partitdo Obrero de Unification Marxista, the political arm of and the militia drawn from the mostly anarchist Confederation National del Trabajo, which had roughly 2 million members: “I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. . . . They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the 20th century."

Those other pics are Gaucin from Encinata's on the Ronda road, looking up, Gaucin from the cemetery, looking down and across to El Hacho (the sharp-edged mountain), and our rental (at center) from the back, on the old road to Gibraltar.

That’s Europe at sundown, from the Medina in Tangier, Morocco, looking across the Mediterranean from our hotel room at La Tangerina.

__________

I’ve been in Gaucin for over a month now, and have settled into the rhythm and the routines the place will impose on you, regardless of how busy you want to be as an American heir to the Puritan/Protestant Ethic. As I wrote to a friend who lives in Prague, I sleep longer here, but I also want to take a nap in the afternoon when the shops close down from 2:00 to 5:00.

Either that, or amble over to one of the cafes where the old men sit with their backs to the wall, their canes extended in a serried row, as if about to raise them in salute to an important passerby. They sit in silence, mostly, watching the street, waiting for the length of the shadows to tell them when they’re expected home.

Their stillness and silence are the gravitational center of the place, shaping if not slowing the pace of the population, ex-pats and permanent residents alike. I want to sit with these old men, just to see Gaucin from their angle of repose. But it’s already too late. By now I can feel my body getting ahead of me, coiling, if you will, tensing up, preparing the rest of me for an impending departure. We leave on Wednesday.

The internet connection in town was out four days over the last two weeks, and meanwhile we visited Tangier (see pics above and below), so I have felt almost untethered to the “real” world as we now apprehend it, in and through cyberspace. Watching “America” from here has been more difficult as a result. But the shadows over there do seem to be in retreat—the light gets brighter even as the news gets worse, or rather gets more grotesque and absurd. Darkness has finally stopped falling.

In any case, my apprehension of “America” is colored these days by my reading about the Spanish Civil War, which is in turn overdetermined by how I “remember” Spain as characterized in John Berger’s great book on Picasso (and so much else)—that is, as a body bound to the rack on which the Inquisition and the modern city tear it apart, a cruel metaphor easily transposed to the extremities of Franco’s quasi-fascist “restoration” of feudal order and Orwell’s front line in Aragon, where the militia’s rule of absolute equality was inviolable.

Our “America” is another land of extremes, stretched on the rack between slavery and freedom, even unto this day., and similarly scarred by a Civil War of epic proportions, which, like other wars of the same species (see: England), both contained and countered a revolution. Experiencing the extreme elsewhere that is Spain, then Africa, in person and in print, reminds me of nothing so much as where I come from. If that sounds parochial, very well, then: I refer you not to Walt Whitman but to Henry James, who kept his expatriate eyes trained on the America scene all the while he was away.

Herewith, then, some observations from over here, most of which I’ve made at Facebook. In reverse chronological order.

__________

JUNE 4. The cataclysms we call revolutions are uniformly preceded by cultural revolutions that create completely new subjectivities, and thus conflicting, ultimately irreconcilable ways of seeing and being in the world.

The two centuries of revolution that began in mid-17th century were “prepared,” as it were, by the creation of unbound individuals who found in civil society a new site of self-discovery and self-determination quite apart from both familial roles and political action as citizen-soldiers, and who meanwhile realized that they inhabited an entirely new cosmos from which God had probably absconded, and in which the old rules of right and wrong, or legal and illegal, had accordingly been adjourned.

This new world was the product of the printing press and the advent of modern market societies, which allowed for both the storage and the privatization of knowledge as well as the commodification of land and labor. The new selves that were its inhabitants, the bearers of what became “liberalism,” were in turn challenged by the rise of collective identities, agencies, and ideologies eventually summarized under the heading of class society (a.k.a. capitalism).

The cultural revolution of our time resides in the choices made available by the articulation of new subjectivities, which. like the bourgeois individuals invented in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, are themselves both presuppositions and products of a slow, grinding, mostly invisible transition from capitalism to . . . some kind of socialism. It’s been in progress since 1890.

The irreconcilable ways of seeing and being in the world that are the inevitable consequence of this transition are on display in the two leading pro-capitalist magazines of our moment, the Financial Times, and The Economist. In the former, the columnist Edward Luce, a regular guest on “Morning Joe,” justifies Gen Z’s socialist propensities as simply rational in view of the idiocies perpetrated by “free markets.” In the latter, the Schumpeter columnist ponders the apocalyptic visions that now animate capitalist investment, and the editor-in-chief discusses the worrisome signs of socialism’s encroachment on the farthest outpost of capitalism, in the USA.

Links below. For now, here’s an excerpt from the Schumpeter column:

“Firms are raising capital in proportion to the intensity of their apocalyptic vision, and are rushing to do so before the impending market collapse many of them expect.

“Fear of missing out has been replaced with something more hysterical. The instinct to accumulate capital is greater if one believes one’s labour will soon become worthless, as some hedge-fund types think. They are betting the house”.

Edward Luce at FT: https://www.ft.com/.../d6b1adcc-a614-4af8-8aa4-56d5c39a42a0?

Schumpeter at The Economist: https://www.economist.com/.../american-capitalism-has...?

Zanny Minton Beddoes at The Economist: “But this week on The Insider we’re zeroing in on leftist thinking in order to scrutinise the new crop of socialists who are making political waves. From New York to Paris, support for the world’s Mamdanis and Mélenchons is surging. In tomorrow’s show we’ll be asking what they want, why they’re winning votes and how they could alter policies and politics across the West. In short: just how dangerous are they?”

JUNE 3. Jamelle Bouie has been the smartest dude at the NYT since Paul Krugman’s departure. Even before that ignominious exit, Bouie’s was the more significant critique of current circumstance, and this because he always drew on, and still grounds every argument in, a usable past—particularly in the two “founding” moments, the revolutionary epochs of the 1770s-80s and the 1850s-60s.

Todays’s brilliant column is a case in point. Notice that in making his argument, Bouie cites Sumner the radical Republican who was first elected to the Senate in 1850 as a Free Soil Democrat, then Lincoln the “moderate” Republican who until 1854 had been a Conscience Whig, and that both invoked the first founding in making what they knew was the Second American Revolution.

If we are to have any chance at making the Third, we’ll have to follow these examples. For innovation is helpless without tradition, and revolution is not reducible to the radicalism that demands a repudiation of the past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/03/opinion/project-2025-2029-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nVA.m_iM.EmL1UbdHN8po&smid=url-share

MAY 30. Back from Tangier, a most mysterious place, where we stayed at La Tangerina Hotel just inside the walled old quarter (the Medina), atop the entire city. Rue Casbah around the corner plunged downhill to Chez Hassan, a great kebab restaurant where the best (also the only) seats in the house were on the street, amongst the friendly feral cats who outnumber the dogs 20 to 1. Most of our tourist destinations were closed for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which marks the moment of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command, and in this extreme way inaugurates monotheism.

The closures seemed to amplify and then diminish the great differences that layer every sight and sound—between modern and traditional dress, between Arabic, French, Spanish, and English dialects, between Africa, Europe, the world elsewhere, and so on. But they remained, because so many centuries of everyday life are sedimented here, on the “streets” that are only four feet wide. The Phoenicians founded it before the Minoans invented their labyrinth, and long before Agamemnon launched his ships.

These are photos from inside but above and then outside but below the wall, from the hotel and from our last stop at a cafe on the way to the ferry.

__________

MAY 14. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama operative/adviser, is a co-host of “Pod Save America” and a mainstream, go-to guy on political campaigns. In Friday’s run-down of Democratic electoral prospects at the NYT, there is not one mention of any candidates’ program or position on pressing issues.

BUT when asked how a candidate combines outrage at the system and hope for the future, who does he cite as the prototypes? Instantly, reflexively, he names Bernie, Platner, and AOC, with Ossof as a postscript. The moral of this story is clear: if you want to win, MOVE LEFT, because, like it or not, that’s where the people are, or are headed.

Here’s how Pfeiffer puts it:

“Democrats need to find a way to be outraged on behalf of the American people while pointing to something better. Bernie Sanders has done a great job of this. Graham Platner is doing it in Maine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does it. Jon Ossoff does, too. It can’t just be outrage for outrage’s sake.”

MAY 18. Matt Stoller nails it at his indispensable anti-mopooly Substack, BIG. Notice that the “generational” change he cites is actually the tectonic ideological shift determined jointly by Occupy and the Tea Party; the effects of the former have been much greater than the latter, regardless of how much Trump now seems to have benefited from that shift

Note also that a proper translation of what Stoller calls “genuine populist policy” is democratic socialism. We’re still winning the war of position, goddamn it, whether we know it or not. Note accordingly that “Epstein” signifies a great deal more than the careless hedonism of the ultra-rich: this is class war.

“There’s more than just those three [Mamdani, Platner, El-Sayed], basically it’s a next generation of Bernie Sanders populists who learned their politics of ignoring establishment norms from Trump. And regardless of how many win, the next few years are going to see genuine populist policy. It’s not just anger at data centers everywhere, it’s gambling, it’s Israel, it’s corruption. On the economic front, Americans absolutely despise surveillance pricing, where they are offered a price based on their personal information. The Epstein class is facing some actual demands on their power.”

MAY 13. Progressive historians, ca. 1893-1951 (from Turner to Woodward) made class conflict rather than racial animus the primal scene of American history, and treated the Civil War accordingly, as the Second American Revolution. The counter-revolution that followed, which systematically disenfranchised and terrorized black people, came to be known as the Jim Crow South, but it was always a national project sanctioned by the Supreme Court—Williams v. Mississippi [1898] is as important as Plessy v. Ferguson [1896]—by the Congress of the US, and ny the white inhabitants of northern cities like Chicago.

And yet the cultural revolution spearheaded, animated, and embodied by the civil rights movement, ca. 1944-1976, succeeded, so that by the turn of the millennium, the “new” human rights of black folk, females, and LBGQT individuals seemed secure. Why, and how?

It’s a pressing question just now, because a new civil war is upon us, and the deck is stacked against the vast majority of Americans, now as then—in the 1850s by the ability of the Slave Power to rule in the name of white male supremacy according to the constitutional logic of the 3/5 clause and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in our time by the ability of the New Oligarchs to rule.in the name of the very same according to the constitutional logic of Citizens United (2010) and Louisiana v. Callais (2026).

Good God, the history of this benighted country, this nation impoverished by its own beliefs and yet empowered by them as well—that history has never seemed so immediately relevant to comprehending the crisis we now face. You want to know how to deal with it? Go ask Sara Grimke, Joshua Leavitt, and Frederick Douglass. By way of A. Lincoln, they will lead you to W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, Robert Williams, MLK, and Malcolm X. And from there . . . .

I

GAUCIN, Spain. There’s nothing like leaving home to remind you of what you’re leaving behind. I don’t mean the kind of exile that is forced on refugees from civil war, foreign invasion, or gang violence. I mean the perspective gained by mere distance between you and your belongings, the fixtures of your everyday life.

I suppose it’s the discontinuity that departure itself imposes on your sense of self. If we were the bundles of sensations that David Hume took us for, we’d be reduced to the unearned innocence of childhood, something like madness or accidental tourism, every day upon waking—we’d be wanting, actually needing, to name and explain everything we encountered as if it were a new experience. The map and the territory would merge: we’d mistake one for the other.

But we’re not such bundles. Alone among we, the animals, us human beings experience space as movement through time, and we cope with the divisions of time by recourse to narrative, through which random events become moments on a continuum with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We map our itineraries before and after the fact. But at least in retrospect, we know there’s more ground back there than we covered.

So, upon this new departure from home, I wonder, what is it that I come from? What remains of my “America,” or call it ours, because then the question becomes, what do we mean, what can we mean, when we refer to this—what?—this phenomenon? These questions are now even more urgent than when I asked them last, on October 22, 2024, as I was getting ready for s trip to Italy, then onto the little town of Gaucin, in Spain, from where I now write. For since then, Donald Trump has been elected president, and with a compliant Supreme Court and a complicit Congress as enabling conditions, has renewed his attempted overthrow of the United States, a constitutional republic.

What, then, is left of us, or to us, by which I mean we, the people who constitute “America,” the collectivity (or territory) that exists prior to, and in excess of, the political entity that is the constitutional republic of the United States? Here’s how I began the inquiry last time out, when I was immersed in “French Theory”:

II

“America is deconstruction, . . . its family name, its toponymy.” That’s Jacques Derrida. “America brings together extracts, it presents samples from all ages, all lands, and all nations.” That’s Gilles Deleuze.

John Locke, G. W. F. Hegel, D. H. Lawrence, and many others have said something similar about this part of the world, from the moment of its “discovery” by Europeans to the present. Oswald Spengler identified the decline of the West with the American habit of monetizing everything, for example, as did Rainer Maria Rilke and his admirer, Martin Heidegger, who deployed the term “Americanization” as he explained how pragmatism was an exception to the rules of western metaphysics. The idea of America seems to have elicited and regulated the thinking of modern Europe. You might even say that absent the Other that is “America,” the idea of Europe was (and is) impossible: it was never the Old World, because its inventors assembled it using raw materials they extracted from the New.

Talk about an indispensable nation.

With these observations in mind, what can—or how does—America mean to me, as I get ready to watch it from over there, as someone removed, this time literally, from the scene? Let me tarry with Madeline Albright’s memorable locution for a moment, minus all the connotations added to it by critics of “American exceptionalism,” who believe, wrongly, that the founders tried to wrest the US from the corrosions of historical time, making it exempt from the laws of historical motion that govern all other civilizations. In what sense is America the indispensable nation?

I’d say it becomes indispensable to the exact extent that it can’t be, or behave, as other nations have, or will. If that makes it exceptional, so be it. I’d prefer to call it the harbinger or the herald of the future—the cutting edge of civilization, for better or worse—because our condition both predicts and produces the planet’s futures; but for now what we call it is less important than understanding it.

III

Now again willingly exiled in Gaucin, I begin to wonder about this vexed notion of “American exceptionalism.” Like many other historians, I have treated it as the ideological deformation shared by those who believe that divine providence has granted the USA a special warrant to do as it will in the world and/or that the New World’s endowments—its huge expanse, it literal and figurative distance from the Old World’s conflicts—have allowed it to escape the burdens of the past, among which are the laws of motion that govern the development of modern capitalism (a.k.a. class society).

The difference between me and almost all other historians—and, I gather, philosophers as well—is simple: I think a thoroughly secularized notion of “exceptionalism” is the invention of American intellectuals who have followed the lead of Europeans like Spengler and Heidegger. It is not, in other words, the handiwork of the benighted American people and the paranoid politicians who cater to their parochial interests. It is the projection of people so alienated from “America” that they are marooned offshore, unable to ground themselves on or in anything other than mad abstractions like “the” working class, or a world without nations.

The idea, for example, that Americans have been exceptionally immune to class conflict, to the appeal of socialism, to Marxist theorizations, etc., and have been correspondingly devoted, blindly and exclusively, to the false promises of liberalism, of individualism, of constitutional proprieties, and so forth, is quite daft (or, to be less dismissive, it is symptomatic of the need of radicals on both the Left and the Right to believe in their marginal standing and their correlative ideological purity).

The idea is certainly not borne out by the historical record, which shows instead that to be an American is to argue about what it means to be an American, and that the argument always turns on an origin story—a usable past—which typically begins but never ends with the founding.

But why are American intellectuals, especially those on the Left, committed to this secular version of exceptionalism? It boils down, I think, to the assumption of radicals that their ethical principles can’t be legible in or derived from the historical circumstances of their own time: what we ought to do is not deducible from what is done, as Kant claimed in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) , as if this were a self-evident proposition.

The assumption, still operative as a self-evident proposition a century and more later, is amplified by what seems to be the belated or laggard state of American intellectual life, wherein Marxism, socialism, communism, and other “ideological extremes” get treated as exotic imports from the other shore—by leftists, liberals, conservatives and reactionaries alike. The practical result has been the refrain that the American people are “not [yet] ready” to hear the message socialists would bring to political discourse, and never will be.

IV

Be all that as it may, I now feel obliged to reconsider the notion of exceptionalism because one of the belongings I carried on this trip is a strange new book by Eyal Peretz called American Medium: A New Film Philosophy (Stanford UP, 2025). It’a a banger. To be more precise: it’s full of preposterous claims that. when savored, pondered, and then tested against both Peretz’s close readings of iconic films and my own experience of “America,” begin to ring true; or, at least they contain enough meanings that I want to know how to apprehend their significance.

As I understand it, here are the ideas at the heart of this astonishing book. If the language sounds a little clotted, blame Heidegger, the presiding spirit in the making of Peretz’s avowedly intuitive premise—that “America” is the setting in which the question of the meaning of Being gets (re)opened, becoming wide open for the first time since the ancient democracies invented tragedy to cope with a world without gods (!).

Keep in mind that Peretz is trying in good faith to account for the extraordinary achievement and the still mostly inexplicable appeal of Hollywood cinema. The question he makes you ask is, how do these movies function as great art on a level with, say, the Oresteia, even though they began as, and yet remain, commodities accessible to mass audiences?

(1) The claim of the United States to exceptionality is embedded and implied in the “suffix” of America, not in a warrant from a transcendent agent removed from the world who is the source of a unitary, non-human truth. In fact, the founding is coincident with, and becomes intelligible as the consequence of, modernity, that is, the moment in trans-Atlantic history when the death of God could be grasped as a real event. “America” signifies the excess of human possibilities unleashed by this demise, including the political (democratic) possibilities.

To wit: “If the United States is exceptional, it is because it seems to be a paradigmatic witness to (‘chosen’ by, addressed by in the manner of Hamlet’s being addressed by the ghost) the cut of modernity, a cut that took it outside the theological/metaphysical ordering of the world, exposing it to the death of God.”

(2) “America” is, then, the (modern) name for the (re)opening of the question of Being: it’s where Heidegger’s relentless search for “aboriginal utterance” can be conducted without reversion to nostalgic planes of existence and longing—that is, where poetic breakthroughs to the excess that resides in that suffix, not in the particular geographical horizon known as the American frontier, become essential to the expression of its multiple meanings. The modernists sensibility specific to 20th- century European intellectuals, including Heidegger (but also Gilles Deleuze!) is inadequate to the comprehension of this search as conducted on American premises.

To wit: “The death of theos is the birth of the question of Being’s meaning. If ‘America,’ as I started to suggest, is the name for the powerful registration of the shock of the modern cut by the United States, then we can see now that ‘America’ is nothing less than.a name through which the US worked out its being inscribed by the modern problem of Being. Thus, ‘America’ will imply, to name only the most oft-discussed aspects, the forgetting of Being and the rise of capitalism and techno-science (as it mainly seems for Heidegger, for example, and the many European thinkers for whom America represented the worst of the modern, as well as many American thinkers adopting the framework of European thinking). But, a fact seemingly missed by most European and Europeanized thinkers the world over (though not by the world masses, “the great unwashed”), ‘America’ will also stand for the powerful raising of the question of the meaning of Being in a new way.” [my italics]

(3). It is one thing to say that in God’s eyes, all souls are equal. It is quite another to treat “all men are created equal” as the mere statement of a self-evident truth that is to be guaranteed by the creation of a man-made but self-regulating government, not by divine providence and its religious attendants in sacrificial rituals. In light of this truth, a democratic, “horizontal” logic can replace the hierarchical, “vertical” logic of political regimes sanctioned, justified, and enforced by (appeal to) divine ordinance.

To wit: “Now, the United States is haunted by the modern cut, by which it feels powerfully addressed, unconsciously, ‘chosen,’ and, needing a term, ‘America,’ that is ‘larger’ than its political/historical specificity in order to name its inscription of something that, by being withdrawn from any specific place and time, calls the whole world, all places and times. . . . Yet what I am calling the atheological cut [the death of God] is precisely not the origin of a privilege to have power over the whole [world] (nor, of course, of a theologically inflected destiny). but the origination of what we can call a democratic logic of singularities where none is entitled to have power over others, even as each is responsible for the whole.” [my italics: cf. Deleuze as above]

(4) Cinema is the American medium par excellence—it alone can convey the meanings of “America”—because (a) all other forms of poetic/enigmatic expression (epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, opera, and of course the novel) were produced and perfected before the US came of age in the 19th century; because (b) both film as a poetic form and “America” as the suffix that signifies excessive openness are predicated on the priority of the cut, in the first as the technique that makes what is off-screen constitute or complete the meaning of what remains in the visible frame, in the second as the departure from the onto-theological (again, the death of God) that makes it the Medium wherein the question of Being can be (re)opened).; and because (c) American cinema at its most ornate Hollywood extreme resonates universally, across nations, cultures, and languages—and attains greatness as poetic expression of the excessive opening made by the cut of modernity—because it is both a medium through which and the Medium in which that fundamental question becomes urgent.

To wit: “To say that ‘America’ is a name for the question of Being’s meaning in the modern age, the age of the demise of onto-theology, thus also means, according to the above, that we can understand the term ‘America’ as a Medium—in the sense of Being-in-excess-of-every-actual-being and in relation to which, with the means of which, all actualities emerge—of modernity (in both senses of the ‘of’).

“This does not mean, of course, that ‘America’ is a specific decision, or answers the epochal question about the meaning of Being but precisely that it is a field of struggle over said meaning. . . . The question of this book is how film becomes the poetic or artistic medium par excellence of [the] poetic dimension, understood as memory-of-the-pure-cut, implied in the Medium ‘America.’ A poetic medium, as I understand it, revolves around [this] memorial ‘more’ implied in the question of Being, thus of the Medium, as it opens in modernity.”

Whew. OK, that’s enough for now. My task now becomes . . . explaining “The Pitt” in the terms on offer from Eyal Peretz. You’re kidding, right?

The Elizabethan Troubadour, at The Pond (see map below), facing north. A jazz trio was playing about eight blocks south of here.

__________

Last Saturday I walked down through the park to 86th Street, near the Reservoir, to meet some friends from out of town who would then wander back uptown with me, headed for a late lunch at Harlem Shake on 124th.

Hundreds of people were out walking, running, cycling, picnicking, playing music, playing ball, pushing strollers, posing for pictures, then taking some, laughing, singing, even dancing, talking, yelling staring, stopping, starting, jostling, watching, listening, pointing . . . . They spoke at least a half dozen languages I didn’t understand, knowing only that they weren’t mine.

The colors have exploded by now, rising to the challenge of the pear trees’ white blossoms: the ground is already a bright green carpet, whether grass on the North Meadow where the ball fields sit or clover beneath the trees in the North Woods, a canvas punctuated by splashes of purple and yellow and red that are random patches of phlox (I think), daffodils, and tulips.

We lingered at the ball fields, where adults in uniform were warming up for a game. These were real athletes who moved with the sly grace specific to baseball, as when the shortstop, having fielded a routine grounder, pauses before he throws to first, knowing somehow that in this interval of his own making, he has the time and space—the detachment—to admire his agility as if he’s watching someone else.

In all there were only about 30 spectators, most of them arrayed on an outcropping of the black rock (“schist”) that is the park’s constant reminder of Manhattan’s geological origins. No matter. These grown men in uniform weren’t there to perform for an (external) audience, and they weren’t getting paid.

We lingered because one of us, the diehard Mets’ fan who was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island, was quite the pitcher in Little League. He still talks about forkballs and split-fingered fastballs in the same tone of wonder that inflects his speech when he talks about how good novels work at the level of their sentences. It’s not the sound of nostalgia, for in that case we’d hear the melancholy you feel when reminded of an irretrievable past. It’s the sound of reliving the past or re-reading a novel for the fun of it, knowing it’s gone but not dead, and never distant: it still makes you smile or move your lips because you know you’ll always be just catching up with it.

That compression of time zones gives the space of the park a fresh set of meanings, and not just because the change of season makes it look different than it did two weeks ago. Everything feels closer, denser—more crowded with life. Even the smell of the place carries more weight and variety, because the plants and the flowers are now competing for the attention of the sentient beings in their vicinity, the insects above all.

There isn’t any way to take it all in, and that is the pleasure of being here, knowing that the world exceeds you, knowing without thinking that it outruns your comprehension, but also that it is nonetheless there. This world contains you even as you change it (and yourself), imperceptibly for now, merely by moving through it, by wearing a path toward home.

Of course you try to contain it, to“put it into words.” I’m trying, so I’ll remember this afternoon. As I do, I begin to wonder if “compression” is the wrong word when I describe how memory disturbs the linear sequence of time, and in doing so changes the experience of space. Perhaps the better word is sedimentation, in the sense that when the world you’re passing through thaws out, you can see how time is layered, or striated, so that from one angle the various stages of life look as if they’ve been neatly stacked, but from another there’s no way to tell the difference between what’s dead and what’s alive.

There is no abiding present to be in, all the exhortations to the contrary, and that’s a good thing. For it’s when you realize that “now” is already over and done even as you seize the time, it’s only then that you can know, again without thinking, why you love the things of this world. They’re worth your love because they, too, will pass. and you long before them. Yet something of both will remain, and not as always, not as if nothing has changed, but rather as evidence of their passage.

So Aristotle was wrong about this, among other things. Only the dead man is happy, he said (approximately), because he’s no longer able to make mistakes and have regrets accordingly. His life is “complete,” finally exempt from the vicissitudes of time if not the judgements of his peers. That man didn’t love the things of this world enough; he probably couldn’t, seeing as how his eyes were so resolutely focused on the eternal truth.

Me, I was happy last Saturday, and long before I got home.

That’s the northern part of the park. The Pond is center left, the Reservoir is bottom right.

In Chicago. “Sun comes up, sun goes down, the spring lies waiting beneath the frozen ground.” [Kim Richey, “So It Goes.”]

__________’

Been on the road for the last week, trying (and failing) to keep up with the “news,” which means trying (and failing) to understand what drives Trump’s increasingly insane utterance and actions. I was on my way to Salt Lake City as I participated in the national—actually, global—nightmare of waiting for this vile man to unleash Armageddon, so that the change in time zones gave me a false but nonetheless comforting sense of reprieve.

Here are my dispatches to myself among others.

__________

APRIL 6. “Aymmetric warfare” has become a trope since February 28: the adjective seems to apply to every aspect of our time. But cliche or not, there is an overriding logic at work here, which is at the heart of liberalism’s decline, in theory and practice, since ca. 1900.

That is the dispersal of power from state to society, as quasi-private entities (mainly corporations) acquired the capacity to regulate markets, hitherto an exclusive prerogative of states.

The opposition of state and society (the separate spheres of “power” and “liberty,” respectively) on which liberalism was built broke down, and with it the distinction between public and private sectors. The personal could become political, and vice versa; so, too, could the socialization of the means of production begin to look like the obvious solution to recurrent economic crisis.****

Warfare was not immune to this logic. Decolonization “de-centered” the world in many ways, not least by the development of insurgent strategies and tactics that erased the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, that is, by stripping states of their monopolies on the violence done by armed forces.

At its extreme this logic leads to terrorism, the “weapon of the weak,” which achieves its goals by assuming that there is no such thing as a non-combatant because everyone at the core of empire is complicit by consent in the suppression of liberation movements on its periphery.

But let us note that unlike the US, Iran is not using the “weapon of the weak”—it has refrained so far from attacking civilian infrastructure, even as the US continues in its campaign to destroy the sinews of everyday life in Iran. Which is to say that the terrorist state in the Middle East, a standing that makes it the principal threat to world peace, is the United States of America.

****Carl Schmitt’s amicus briefs on behalf of fascism were predicated on this dispersal of power (which was not a zero-sum game: the powers of the state increased in the 20th century). And he was scrupulous in footnoting his intellectual indebtedness to (and his contempt of) the pluralists—the pragmatists—of his time, including, or rather especially, William James.

APRIL 8. What happened here? Iran won. Trump put the entire world at risk because his instincts coincided with Israel’s ambitions. Trump’s profound stupidity, as amplified by his unrelenting avarice, has destroyed the credibility of the US, for friends as well as foes.

And he has now announced his intention to pillage all social programs to fund more idiot adventures like the one just concluded with yet another disaster for American standing in the world.

Yo, Bret Stephens. Tell us how Iran lost. Al-Jazeera reports that the 10-Point Plan contains:

(1) Fundamental commitment to non-aggression from the US.

(2) Controlled passage through the Strait of Hormuz in coordination with the Iranian armed forces, which in effect would mean that Iran retains its leverage over the waterway.

(3) An acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme.

(4) The lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions and resolutions against Iran.

(5) End of all resolutions against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

(6) End of all resolutions against Iran the United Nations Security Council.

(7) The withdrawal of US combat forces from all bases in the region.

((8) Full compensation for damages suffered by Iran during the war — to be secured through payments to Iran by ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

(9) The release of all Iranian assets and properties frozen abroad.

(10) The ratification of all these matters in a binding UNSC resolution.

APRIL 8. “incompetence” explains nothing when we contemplate Trump’s epic failures (cf. Michael Klare). The tariffs, the tax cuts, the destruction of federal capacity, the imperial idiocies, etc., these aren’t a matter of mismanagement, a lack of intelligence or skills.

They are the predictable results of greed unleashed, unbound, unhindered by any moral or political constraint. But this, I would remind you, is not what capitalism inevitably delivers—it is what happens when a ruling class no longer has the resources or the will to govern on behalf of ALL “the people” rather than for itself, when it no longer believes that its values are universal, and universally beneficial.

At that point, which was reached ca. 1979, civil society itself becomes the site of plunder rather than the source of surplus in every sense (that is, social, economic, cultural excess, which can be equitably shared). Trump personifies this decay. He’s the epitome of capitalism in its death throes. L’etat, c’est lui.

APRIL 9. Two signals can be heard through the noise of “uncertainty” about the ceasefire and the Strait of Hormuz. First, Israel has no intention of suspending military strikes against its chosen targets in Iran and Lebanon, no more than is has suspended the slaughter in Gaza under the terms of a ceasefire. That is its contribution to the peace talks, from which it has been formally but not effectively excluded. Second, Trump, the greedy deal-maker who can’t see past the bottom line, has every intention of making the US Iran’s partner in profiting from the Strait by turning it into a toll road. A “joint venture,” he calls it. He’s right about that. By now all three are willing parties to violations of international law, not to mention the commitment of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

APRIL 9. When The Economist is better than the Democratic Party leadership at explaining why Trump’s war is insane as well as unjust, you know that AIPAC has to step up its spending in London. Yo, Chuck, Hakeem, Cory, hey guys, read it and weep:

“America under Mr Trump has even more to reflect on. The country used to derive its power by marrying military strength with moral authority. But when this president threatens to wipe out the Iranian civilisation—a genocide by any other name—he treats morality as if it were a source of weakness.

“Some in the Trump administration behave as if America is tied down by things like international law and the Geneva conventions. Liberated from those constraints it will be more powerful. The war has shown that “might is right” is not just a desecration of decades of foreign policy, but a fallacy. Although America’s military superiority was on full display in Iran—integrating artificial intelligence into operations, rescuing downed pilots, achieving supremacy at low cost—it also revealed deep problems.

“The war has shown that the value of America’s might is easy to overestimate. Its factories cannot resupply its armed forces fast enough, whereas Iran fought an asymmetric war with limited weapons. Too much testosterone leads to wretched judgments that confuse lethality with winning. Overwhelming firepower without a strategy saps American strength.

“Iran has a wicked regime, but a just war depends on a sober judgment that violence is a necessary last resort. Instead Mr Trump treated Iran as a vanity project, in which America’s strength absolved him of the responsibility for thinking through the consequences of choosing to attack. Might alone is not right. Sometimes it fails even to bring victory.”

APRIL 10. Trump is a traitor, literally, willing to sacrifice American lives, never mind the Dream, to secure the interests of Putin’s Russia. That sensational conclusion was once confined to the margins of discourse, where conspiracy theories are the lingua franca. Until Tuesday, when Thomas Edsall nailed it down in the paper of record.

Each week, Edsall’s NYT column demonstrates how the middlebrow media translate academic findings for mass consumption, suggesting both the centrality of higher education in the cultural life of the nation and the idiocy of the professors’ lament that they don’t (or can’t) communicate with the American people. Edsall himself is normally as prim, staid, and cautious as any academic in writing for peer-reviewed publications. No longer. He’s as appalled as the rest of us by Trump’s hatred of America. Here’s the conclusion of Tuesday’s column:

“We have a president willing to neglect his obligation as commander in chief to protect the nation’s soldiers, a president who kowtows to an authoritarian dictator actively helping America’s adversaries, a president in debt to that same dictator for services rendered in the 2016 campaign, and a president who often behaves as if he were a Russian asset, witting or unwitting.

“Put another way, we have a 79-year-old president captured by an adolescent need to win the approval of . . . Vladimir Putin.

“More important, this same president will remain in office for the next two years and nine months, empowered to continue his wanton destruction of American democracy at home, the alliances America built in the aftermath of World War II, and the very idea of freedom both here and abroad.”

APRIL 10. [The previous post at Facebook of April 10 prompted a barrage of indignant, indeed angry comments, which denounced (a) my naivete and/or (b) my complicity with the mainstream narrative that explained Trump’s 2016 election by reference to external factors (Russia) rather than internal (liberal) rot. I responded as follows.]

Well, golly. I had no clue that this would stir up such passions. When I say that Trump is a traitor, I mean to the idea of America as the “place” where liberty and equality go together in the making of an open, democratic culture, society, and polity. Where the ethical principle enunciated in the Declaration becomes legible in the historical circumstances enabled by the Constitution—where “ought” resides in and flows from the “is.” Now, regardless of the kompromat’s source, whether FBS/KGB or Mossad, and regardless of whether there is such incriminating material at hand to either agency, Trump is a traitor so conceived, someone who would willingly, gladly renege on this fragile promise of American life. Those of you who think that Trump is true to the historical America, and so can’t be accused of traitorous behavior, are marooned outside of historical time, without a usable past. That is the place where the “ought” doesn’t root in and flower from the “is,” where, a John Dewey put it, your imprecations and exhortations amount to a “mere pious wish that things should be better.”

APRIL 12. Today Hasan Piker is the subject of two opinion pieces, one by Ezra Klein at NYT, the other by Jonathan Cohn at The Bulwark. As I read them, they’re passports that will allow Piker admission to the mainstream over the objections of AIPAC, ADL, and Third Way, the pathetic refuge of the Democratic Party’s Clintonian wing. For they both emphasize two glaring facts that the Dem leadership simply can’t acknowledge.

First, Piker is not a “Jew hater” because he uses words like apartheid and settler colonialism to describe the state (in every sense) of Israel. Second, the electorate and the larger public reject the foreign policy reflex that unthinkingly aligns the US with the imperial ambitions of Israel (NB: this rejection need not be the function of solidarity with the Palestinian cause). Cohn’s essay founders when he suggests that MAGA voters won’t respond to El-Sayed because he ignores Piker’s incendiary remarks: that is exactly why they will. Voters across the board are so sick of the status quo that they elected a moron who is also a rapist to blow it up. Why not an MD who endorses M4A and says enough already with the slaughter that attends “Greater Israel”?

This war is lost. The Strait of Hormuz will not be re-opened under American or international auspices. Al-Jazeera reported this morning, however, that Japanese and French vessels were allowed safe passage through the Strait. So much for NATO.

But Pete Hegseth is firing generals, presumably so that no officer stands in the way of orders that are ill-advised, illegal, or otherwise athwart the rules of engagement, the Geneva Conventions, and the standards of modern human decency. And Donald Trump is staying in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, instead of playing golf in Florida, suggesting that “boots on the ground” are still a possibility.

Anyway. My commentary over the last few days. On Wednesday I paused to listen in on the arguments at SCOTUS. Good thing it was April Fool’s Day. See APRIL 1 below.

__________

APRIL 3. What do you call a commander-in-chief who admits that he has lost the war and who is now in retreat from the field of battle, but uses his military latitude and power to destroy the fabric of the enemy’s everyday life by bombing civilian infrastructure? A war criminal, of course. I don’t see how else to read Trump’s speech of Wednesday night, that is, as a confession of both impotence and guilt.

I’m reading American Medium: A New Film Philosophy, a brilliant book by Eyal Peretz. In the Introduction, he conjures the humility that Americans might learn from the appeal exerted by the figure of “America,” a notion that exceeds the United States. Here’s how he puts it:

“American democracy refers not to the specific politics of the US but instead to a whole ontological-political logic (which can be instantiated in many different ways) that the US, as paradigmatic witness to the modern a-theological cut, is as if called to transmit, expressing its responsibility for . . . rather than its power over, the whole, the world.”

APRIL 2. I hate "thought experiments," they're too much like counter-factuals, ugh, but here's one I just tried out.on the phone with a friend. Suppose that the Dems flip the House bigly, and come close in the Senate. Impeachment articles are quickly drawn up, and the verdict goes to the Senate. The Dem leadership, now aware that the Progressive Caucus is the future of the party, approaches its Republican counterpart and says, "Look, you need this guy gone as much as we want him in jail. If you vote with us, your grandchildren won't despise you, the textbooks won't ridicule you, and your wife will forget you fucked Noem's husband in the cloak room when she testified." Case closed.

Vance celebrates because Miller leaves the WH with Trump, Hegseth celebrates because he gets to show up at the bar, Rubio celebrates because he can wear his own shoes--also, his drug empire now extends to the homeland (Cuba)--and MAGA Nation celebrates its secession ordinances, which declare that South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi now compose a sovereign entity that repudiates the national debt of the US.

APRIL 1. “My solution to the problem would be to tell [the Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.” That’s General Curtis LeMay, who planned the firebombing of Japan in 1945. From his memoir, published in 1965, three years before he became George Wallace’s running mate. Has no one in or near the White House told Trump, Miller, or Hegseth about the episode Americans call the Vietnam War? Has no one explained that the US lost that war?

APRIL 1. “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship.” Those are the words of Stephen Miller, the master of deportation ceremonies, the co-author (with the cretinous Michael Anton) of the brutish NSS, the man who would be Goebbels.

He was explaining at X what is at stake in the SCOTUS arguments of today on birthright citizenship—nothing less than the resurrection of the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which assumed that the imported “foreign labor class” at issue was composed of slaves, who could not be citizens. The 14th Amendment of 1868 explicitly repudiated Dred Scott. To cancel its first clause on birthright citizenship, as Miller wants, is to return us to the moral silence on slavery that the Civil War was supposed to end. Jamelle Bouie is excellent today on these matters. Garrett Epps is even better.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/03/30/birthright-citizenship-case-could-create-a-noncitizen-class/?

MARCH 31. “Go get your own oil,” Trump says. It is dawning on me (well, duh) that his new declaration of independence—you Europeans, or you Asians, you who need the oil, y’all go ahead, feel free to open the Strait—completes the destruction of the postwar global order he promised. The US is deserting the vessel it crafted and has steered since 1944. It’s not just NATO that is over and done, at least according to this latest outburst from the man child who claims to be in charge. The world economy is also breaking into “spheres of influence” that may or may not be reintegrated. And the dollar? When it is no longer the currency required by most international transactions, what happens to the ability of the US to finance its debt, including its defense spending?

MARCH 31. Pete Hegseth is ranting just now about “completing the mission,” which as far as he can—and does—tell, means dropping more bombs and killing more people. There is no “until,” no prospective peace, attached to these participles. In that rhetorical context, how can Iran take a diplomatic overture from the US seriously? How could anyone? Especially as POTUS himself rants in the same way, threatening to order the US military to commit war crimes by destroying desalination plants in Iran?

Hereafter, we’re moving in chronological order.

__________

MARCH 25. Happy to report that today the Board of the U Chicago Press approved my book for publication. The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Levelled Philosophy, Caused “French Theory,” and Reinvented Selfhood, will be out in early 2027. Several obstreperous Reader2s appeared in the review process, but in the end, I prevailed. Yes, it took a year of such wrangling. Let us hope that books are still getting read next year. Faheem Haider‘s drawing of William James will grace the cover if I have my way.

MARCH 26. Desperate men turn to desperate measures. Trump knows that the midterms will complete the destruction of his credibility, so he now demands voter suppression via the SAVE Act, and lets Hegseth deliver a “final blow” to Iran by use of ground forces in Iran—the invasion is coming this weekend. Meanwhile Netanyahu pursues the systematic destruction of infrastructure, especially health care and education, in Lebanon and Iran as per the Gaza template, reducing strategy to tactics (as even Richard Haas acknowledges) and the region to rubble. Read for the ending: the eschaton is upon us because these two men believe that there can be no limits on their power, or, what is the same thing, that the extermination (”annihilation,” “obliteration,” etc.) of the enemy is the only ending worth pursuing.

[The Economist saud this on MARCH 26: “EVEN BY HIS chaotic standards, Donald Trump has just presided over an unusually wild week in his misguided war on Iran. The president had threatened imminent, punitive bombing of Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure. Though Iran didn’t quail, markets did. So a U-turn followed. Mr Trump said he had become aware of secret proposals for peace talks, and held off. The Pentagon then said it would send some of the 82nd Airborne Division. That suggests escalation is still a possibility. Amid such uncertainty, Iran’s regime seems unfazed. Remarkably, it now has a strategic advantage over its opponents.”]

[By Neve Gordon at NYRB, a follow-up to his reporting at the LRB on “human shields” in Gaza. The goal as posited and enacted in Gaza, now in Lebanon and Iran, is to degrade health and education to the point of extinction. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/22/the-gaza-doctrine-iran-lebanon/?]

MARCH 27. Daniel Oppenheimer runs the rare podcast where improvisation rather than scripted set pieces prevails. Andrew Hartman and I visited this scene in early March to talk about Marx—more specifically, about how and why Marxism remains pervasive because it's persuasive. Andrew's recent book and Daniel's earned innocence kept us talking. The result is more fun than you might expect from such a conversation.

Eminent Americans

I Get Schooled on Marx

My guests on today’s episode are historians Andrew Hartman and James Livingston. Andrew is a professor of history at Illinois State University and the author, most recently, of Karl Marx in America. Jim is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of…

Listen now

5 months ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Daniel Oppenheimer and James Livingston

MARCH 28, Read Mark Provost‘s post today, on the expiration of Trump’s ability to calm the markets via the TACO trade, then Roger Gathman‘s recent posts on the absurdity of NYT reporting, which proceeds as if Trump is just another venal politician, and you’ll start thinking that there’s an explanation for the seemingly insane solidarity of Wall Street and MAGA Nation—for their devotion to the idea that Trump acts in their interest, and so must be supported, no matter how stupid or destructive his purposes, methods, and accomplishments are.

You’ll also start thinking that the complacency of the NYT complements this solidarity: it seals the deal, so to speak.

For Wall Street, that interest is corporate profitability, which has risen at the expense of wages and everything else that makes life affordable or merely comfortable. For MAGA Nation, it’s the erasure of anything that might remind Americans of what still requires repair and redemption--racial injustice, to begin with, but also inequality of the basic, economic kind, which, God forbid, the majority of Americans has decided can be addressed by social-democratic means.

And the NYT? I begin to think that its commitment to “objectivity” is a form of nihilism, which has become suicidal for its own part, and homicidal for the rest of us. In any case, it validates whatever narrative spills from the sewer over which Stephen Miller and Suzie Wiles preside.

For when the paper of record “reports” on Trump as if he is NOT scheming to destroy what remains of American democracy, NOT trying to enrich his family and friends by openly accepting bribes, NOT violating international law and committing war crimes at will, it leaves the reading public with the impression that things are more or less “normal,” not something to get too excited or agitated about.

Facts and values are indissoluble, so if you claim that your reporting is unbiased, you are claiming that you have no values--or that you have set yours aside in the name of “objectivity.” Either way, you have established a moral equivalence between values, no matter who enunciates them, or what they entail. If that is not nihilism, I don’t know what is.

Here, too, is a podcast David Barfield and I did with Toby Craig Jones, my former colleague at Rutgers, who is an authority on Saudi Arabian history and Middle Eastern development more generally. He’s the author of two books on the region and is currently writing two more, one of them on the contours of American Empire in this part of the world.

MARCH 18. You know how most Southern white men made it clear to the world that they’d rather be dead than be treated as the equals of black men? They called their suicide pact the Confederate States of America, and then declared a War for Southern Independence. In view of how Trump & Co. have deliberately eviscerated the rule of law, democratic norms, scientific standards, and intellectual excellence at home, and meanwhile, in the Middle East, have willfully destroyed American credibility, power, and military capacity abroad—not to mention the standing of the dollar as the reserve currency of international trade and investment**—it now seems fair to call MAGA Nation a suicide pact drawn up on grounds analogous to the Confederacy, and Trump’s declaration of war against Iran a suicide note written on its behalf.

[**Iran has offered safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz to vessels whose owners/insurers are willing to denominate their cargo in Chinese currency, as against the “petrodollar” norm since 1975.]

MARCH 20. Put aside the question of good and evil--who are the good guys, which side are you on?--and ask, what does Iran want from this conflict, what does it need, and what can it realistically expect to gain? The answer is now singular: the expiration of Israel’s license to destroy any perceived threat to its domination of the region, wherever that threat is located, whether in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran—all of which Israel has, in fact, attacked, with or without diplomatic or material support from the US, since 2001.

Iran’s success in meeting this strategic goal is now within reach, because both the US and Israel have finally overreached. The only move the US can make that might undo this unintended consequence is to use the 31st Expeditionary Unit to invade Kharg Island and open the Strait of Hormuz. But that can’t be a temporary measure because the insurgency that will ensue, even if the existing nation-state of Iran is disarmed, already exists as a trained, disciplined, and lethal force, in the obvious form of the IRGC.

Moreover, according to the Counterinsurgency Manual of 2007, twenty combatants are required for every thousand inhabitants of the city, region, or nation to be pacified by counterinsurgent tactics. Suppose, then, that only 20% of Iranians are loyal to the regime, roughly 18 million people. Do the math: no nation or coalition of the willing could muster the counterinsurgent force necessary to “keep the peace.” Checkmate. Unless the nuclear option (!) is chosen, the Strait will reopen, but on Iran’s terms, and this signifies not only the end of the dream of Greater Israel but the twilight of the American Empire. Meanwhile, of course, we will have to endure the collateral damage.

My comments, added as clarification:

This from Axios, which suggests that the world economy goes way south while we bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, in preparation for an invasion: “’We need about a month to weaken the Iranians more with strikes, take the island and then get them by the balls and use it for negotiations,’ said a source with knowledge of White House thinking.” (But if the conflict continues for another month, which is what it will take to “soften up” Kharg for an amphibious assault according to the Trump insider quoted at Axios, the price of oil will reach $180/barrel, according to the Saudi officials cited by Andrew Ross Sorkin in NYT today, March 20.)

Scott Bessent tells FOX Business News that the US might “unsanction” the Iranian oil that is “on the water,” that is, beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and “bound for China.” That is 10 to 12 days of supply, he says, and will keep prices stabilized for that long. Are these people out of their fucking minds? Does the US just keep dropping bombs and firing missiles while it diverts oil from here to there, raising prices because China is going to buy it somewhere, somehow, and because the growing uncertainty about supply will amplify that effect in futures markets?

There were/are 8 to 20 thousand civilians living on Kharg Island (presumably to operate the machinery of oil transit from the mainland to the Strait and beyond). The 112th Zolfaghar Surface Combat Brigade is stationed there as well, although who knows how many have survived the recent attacks by the US? Do they stand by while the 31st Expeditionary Unit comes ashore, or parachutes in?

From Project Syndicate: “The conventional explanation for such decisions is incompetence or impulsiveness. Neither fits the case here. Whereas incompetence produces random damage, the decision to attack Iran fits a pattern of decision-making that is too consistent to be accidental. Likewise, impulsiveness implies a future that one has failed to calculate properly, but Trump’s relationship to the future is something different than miscalculation. Across his presidency, in domain after domain – fiscal policy, scientific funding, alliance management, climate commitments, and now munitions stockpiles—present consumption comes at the expense of future resilience.

“Trump is not a man who discounts the future too steeply. He is a man for whom the future does not register as a real cost when measured against the spectacle of decisiveness that he wants to stage. This is not recklessness within a strategic framework; it is the collapse of any strategic framework’s first axiom: tomorrow is coming.”

Here is my homage to the Oscars. You might have missed it in 2025, when these two movies came out almost simultaneously. It was originally intended for Project Syndicate, but I got carried away with the writing while in Gaucin, in Spain, last May, probably because I was anxiously awaiting reader reports on my book from the University of Chicago Press (good news there, finally). So it ended up at Liberties thanks to Celeste Marcus, the talented managing editor.

My original inspiration was the expansive, fearless prose of Greil Marcus, but 50 years after Mystery Train, I was still daunted by what I took to be a late-20th century admonition: “writing about music is like singing about architecture.” As you will see, the antecedent dates to 1918, when the invidious comparison was to “dancing about architecture.” But at about the same time, a famous filmmaker (Carl Dreyer) defined architecture as “frozen music,” and suggested that movies could thaw it out. Could it be that Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” rises to the challenge by telling the story of Jim Crow America in music, thus unfreezing the architecture of contemporary politics on this unlikely, unholy ground?

__________

Can the blues set you free? It’s hard to say, because, as you have probably heard from a reliable source whose play lists favor classic rock, “writing about music is like singing about architecture.” Meaning that it’s kind of pointless, because there are no words for what music makes you feel—you can explain the immediate physical sensations induced by these sounds in terms of waves and frequencies, but it’s near impossible to provide a verbal transcript of the desires and the memories those sensations become when inscribed on your body.

Turns out that the line is a venerable commonplace first recorded in 1918, and that the original enlists a different set of skills: “it’s like dancing about architecture.” But this old twist makes the admonition all the more prohibitive, because dance music is of course the lowest common denominator in the affective universe we ascribe to music as such (see: American Bandstand, disco, Soul Train). The audiences in opera houses and concert halls know better than to get up and dance.

Their stillness is remarkable. To be sure, music is the most cerebral, most immaterial of media; but it engages the body more easily and effectively than any other medium, mainly because the order and pitch of certain notes (as structured by rhythm) will evoke desire or anxiety, thus expectations of satisfaction, release, or resolution, in listeners. At least they will in the post-Renaissance western world, where tonal-harmonic music became the cultural norm, and where such expectations could, therefore, be sonically produced as the occasion required — typically by treating dissonance as both deviation from and promise of equilibrium, of musical resolution.

So the mind/body problem that has shaped western philosophy from its founding moments is near at hand in the interpretation of music, regardless of how, or whether, listeners are equipped to express and explain their responses. And with that philosophical problem, that dissonance, comes the tentative resolution we call our selves; for these phenomena derive immediately, necessarily, from our everyday enactment of the relation between mind and body, for example in how we respond to inchoate desires, by repressing, deferring, or gratifying them. In reminding us quite forcefully of our bodies, music tends to unsettle this relation, and therefore to disrupt the continuity of our selves. So it makes us reach for memories — the mostly futile search we conduct in words and images — as the means of restoring and maintaining that continuity.

These proximities are what the brilliant musicologist Susan McClary had in mind when she declared that “music is always a political activity, and to inhibit criticism of its effects for any reason is likewise a political act.” This dictum sounds no less extreme (or Aristotelian) than the feminist slogan that made it possible—the personal is political—but it makes perfect sense because political theory and practice are answers to the question of what each of us, our selves, can demand of others, and what they owe us, in view of what we assume these selves are able to do. McClary’s dictum is corroborated, in any case, by reference to the production and reception of “A Complete Unknown” and “Sinners,” two recent movies that tell political stories with music, and vice versa.

Both films are based loosely on non-fiction books about music, which, because they’re about music, read more like literary criticism than conventional historical narratives. James Mangold’s story of Dylan’s departure from the folk scene is a transposition of Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015) and Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005). Ryan Coogler’s romance of African-American life in the Jim Crow South is a response to the call of Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans (1970), The Hero and the Blues (1972), and Stompin’ the Blues (1976).

I call them political stories because both are “period pieces,” movies that strive to capture the look and feel of a specific historical moment, and do so artfully, by use of cinematic devices that place us fore and aft, in the richness and depth of classic Hollywood film, but from the sonic and scenic distance permitted by digital innovations since then. That simultaneous removal from and recreation of the “original” settings (the 1960s, the 1930s) are what makes these movies political acts—these directors aren’t pretending that their narratives comprehend the past as such, they’re rewriting or restaging parts of it, and thus doing what modern historians have always done, revising the past by retelling it with contemporary questions and methods in mind.

“Dylan” himself makes that purpose his own when the character “Sylvie,” Suzie Rotolo’s screen double, presses him on the details of his origins—he declares that people invent such things as they get along with telling the story of their lives. Consciously or not, film directors are narrators who assume the truth of that declaration. They know that doing history, revising the past, is always a political activity; for by creating origin stories, and by situating us in real or imagined time, where social purposes and cultural consequences can be depicted, the narrator is identifying the sources of human agency (“subjectivity”), individual and collective, while also acknowledging impediments to it.

The intrinsically political nature of treating history as a story is announced in the subtitles of the two books that inform “A Complete Unknown.” The keywords here are “split” and “crossroads,” which suggest divisions of time or in space, sequences or patterns that, once upon a time, permitted choices. Wald conjures a before and after, a temporal movement that made a lasting difference, while Marcus creates an abiding moment, using a resonant spatial metaphor that is both map and territory — the times have changed, or they’re still-a-changin.’ The movie asks us to look at it both ways.

Of course the script and the production design remind us of where we are in time, back then. But Mangold locates us more precisely in the past by discursive, almost unnoticeable devices. The political context of the 60s—the Cuban missile crisis, CORE’s freedom riders, the March on Washington of August 1963, the assassination of JFK three months later—is established obliquely, in passing remarks early on, but mostly by watching television out of the corner of the eyes of the cast, or rather listening with them to Walter Cronkite while their (and our) attention wanders around the set. The past becomes a more palpable, more insistent presence through cutting-edge technical means: the soft, rounded, twilight colors achieved through the deep focus of classical Hollywood movies are modeled here by using a laser to convert digital, then analog stock to a visual artifice that “takes on all the qualities of film,” as Phedon Papamichael, the cinematographer, explains the process. (Autumn Dural Akapaw, the cinematographer of “Sinners,” used comparable techniques to achieve the same classic Hollywood effect.)

These devices work. The movie feels as old as the studied innocence and political piety embodied in the characterization of Pete Seeger, the man who, as Woody Guthrie’s stand-in and consiglieri, represents the folk movement that allowed Bobby Zimmerman, the Little Richard impersonator from Hibbing, Minnesota, to reinvent himself as Bob Dylan the roots musician in Greenwich Village, ca. 1961. That this folk movement was convened by the Old Left as a dimension of the CP’s Popular Front is announced at the outset, in the courtroom scene where Pete answers charges of contempt brought by HUAC with an offer to play a song on his trusty banjo. The new dynastic relation between Seeger and Dylan—and thus the fraught relation between the hierarchical Old and the centrifugal New Lefts—is enunciated in the following scenes, when Bobby shows up in Woody Guthrie’s sanitorium room where Seeger serves as translator, and then on the drive to Pete’s rustic upstate cabin when, with the dashboard radio’s help, Bob summarizes his musical origins and tastes as very mixed bags.

Seeger plays the translator, the mediator, all along, introducing and explaining and excusing Bobby as necessary in a weary, sing-song voice, until that fateful night at the Newport Folk Festival, July 24, 1965, when Pete finally stands up as well as in for the dead language of the folkie past, and threatens to pull the plug on Dylan’s electrified transition—or return—to the blues idiom he knew better than any other. The politics of this movie are compressed in that moment, in that gesture to the blues, the music that keeps time running backward and forward, toward the nation conceived in slavery but dedicated nonetheless to the proposition that, someday, all men and women will know each other as equals.

And the present? How do we know, without thinking about it, that the movie locates us in the here and now even as it immerses us in the world elsewhere that is the past of 60 years ago? How can viewers accredit their simultaneous presence in two time zones? The answer is in the artificiality of the apparatus itself, in the removal from real waking time that you experience and accept as soon as you enter the theater or click “play” on the remote—or open the book. On the page, that removal is accomplished, and your suspension of disbelief begins, as soon as the author gets beyond the archive by adding something, anything, to the assembled evidence; indeed the use of the past tense is usually enough to place the reader in the presence of the author, at a distance from what the author is explaining.

But stories explain without argument. And so the point is that, whether you are watching or reading, and whether you are absorbing fiction or non-fiction, the mere presence of a narrative form, on the screen or on the page, is enough to convince you that you are not there, on the scene as it unfolds according to the narrator, but are rather in the place and time you know as the present.

Wald constantly reaffirms this “stereophonic” principle. He writes from what he perceives (and makes us feel) as a great temporal distance from the quasi-political skirmishes he describes, as if he’s a military historian who specializes in the wars of antiquity. He also turns himself into a Seeger-like figure, becoming a sounding board that compiles but won’t assess the contemporaneous yet incommensurable narratives of the various transitions he meticulously records—from the folk movement to the moment of rock ‘n roll, from the latter to “rock,” a more serious and non-harmonic music, from sound check to Dylan’s set at Newport in 1965, from Newport to Woodstock, etc.—all the while measuring the loss of blood and treasure to the commercial mainstream where the siphons and spigots of pop music are permanent fixtures. Every moment in the book is a before or an after, an either/or.

Marcus violates this principle, as Dylan has consistently tried to, making us experience his music as a “space” that exceeds or ignores any articulation of time, becoming a topological map of American history in its entirety — or, as I would prefer to put it, a geographical eschatology that turns Huck Finn’s territory, the fabled frontier, inside out, importing all the social questions that the uncivilized margin of civilization was supposed to export, once upon a time. “The unmapped country prophesied in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is still there,” Marcus concludes, “hanging in the air as a territory of danger and flight, abandonment and discovery, truth and lie,” but in 2005 it seemed to him to be coming from another country, because he sensed that “no one has been there in years.” He hears the song as an epic fairy tale that was then and is now in search of lost time, “the thing itself, the past.” [pp. 19, 201, 91]

Notice the phrase, “in the air.” This is a way of saying that music transports us differently than watching and reading, because even though it’s invisible, sound moves through space at a certain speed, then causes eardrums to vibrate, and in doing so it reorganizes the hierarchy of the larger sensorium, subordinating the eye to the ear by mobilizing the rest of the body, forcing the mind to catch up, or just leaving it behind. Under the spell of music, time doesn’t stand still, it dilates, unfolds, expands; for when memory’s archive becomes the body, chronology stops making sense. To paraphrase Jacques Attali, music makes the simultaneity of different times—or different stages of history—audible, sometimes so effectively that you can dance to it.

In this narrative key, we’re always already catching up to Dylan not because his music is timeless but because that six-minute recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which hit the charts the day before his electric set at Newport, both recollected the past and predicted the future, and this we know—we can hear and feel it in our bones—because subsequent generations of listeners and performers keep responding to it, transforming it by repetition, rearrangement, or re-composition, according to their own needs and dialects. The extant “translations” of the song observe no linguistic, generic, or geographical limits. They range from reggae (Bob Marley) to Italian hip-hop (the Mystery Tramps). “A Complete Unknown,” the movie, is the latest and most elaborate of the responses to Dylan’s epic fairytale, which lingers or languishes according to the state of the nation it calls to attention.

So the question is not whether but how the music continues to transport us in this way. “A Complete Unknown” offers that the fateful night in Newport was a turning point—an ending and a beginning, a new direction but along an old and beaten path—because Dylan deliberately grounded his music in the blues idiom, a gesture made explicit by the presence of Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Plugging in was more incidental than important.

The blues was and is an American music in the very strong sense that it is a non-European idiom born of the minor pentatonic scale, the root of all Celtic and most African musics, which became the vernacular music of the American South when the Scots-Irish of the Piedmont and the West Africans of the Tidewater encountered each other as citizens and slaves—as people who could hear themselves in the sounds made by the Other. It is essential to understand this encounter if we want to understand the blues, and our American selves. For in the same strong sense that makes the US appear an exception to the rules that regulate the historical development of other nations, the blues idiom both drew and defied the original color line that defined the limits of freedom in America. It came of age in the early 20^th century as the most pliable but also most durable of the new dance musics that would erase the “bachelor culture” of the saloons and eclipse the sacrificial sounds coming from houses of worship, even the gospel coming from black churches.

The blues idiom exceeded its regional origins as a result of diaspora — the exodus from the Jim Crow South brought almost a million black people to northern cities between 1910 and 1930, and produced cultural enclaves like Harlem and the South Side almost overnight. Meanwhile, the new electrified means of mechanical reproduction which enabled the second industrial revolution allowed recordings from the Black Belt and the Delta to be distributed nationwide in the late 1920s and 30s. Many of these recordings were “race records,” to be sure, but when played on the phonograph or heard on the radio, they made the accents of race inaudible: when the jug bands start up, it’s hard to tell whether the singers are black or white, and the blues idiom has no obvious color. These records composed the aural tradition that was preserved on late-night radio out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and that was compressed in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). They became the canonical pieces to which the young Bobby Zimmerman listened and from which the mature Bob Dylan kept learning.

In the US, the blues revival of the late 1950s was animated by the folk ideal of authenticity—the white curators who featured Son House at Newport assumed that an old man bent over his acoustic guitar was the real Delta deal. At the same moment, however, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who also performed at Newport in the early 60s, were playing electric guitars backed by bands in Chicago dance clubs, and were recording with studio musicians at Chess. Meanwhile, the urban blues, Chicago-style, was being discovered and revised in the UK, where authenticity also meant ensembles, electricity, and audiences that didn’t sit still or stay quiet as if they had been ushered into concert halls. By the 1960s, in short, the blues idiom was spoken in several distinct dialects that were identifiable by nation as well as region, style, and instrumentation, and that were redrawing the color line even as they continued to build on the black aesthetic specific to the best of American culture.

By “black aesthetic” I don’t mean something invented only or owned exclusively by black folk. The blues idiom as such is anything but monochromatic. Instead I mean the attitude of artists who treat the color line as the malleable relation between black and white—as both a boundary and a portal, something that demands a choice, but not a choice between black and white, and that also requires amplification, but not the mere addition of black to white, or vice versa. The attitude of the black aesthetic is an essentially comedic one that works in two ways. On the one hand, this attitude treats good and evil as moments on a continuum rather than the terms of an either/or choice, and demonstrates accordingly that these attributes of individual character and aspects of social life are evenly distributed, as it were, within individuals and across society. On the other hand, the comedic attitude of the black aesthetic contains the tragedy of American history, in both the inclusive and exclusive senses of that verb. The blues is the epitome of this aesthetic because it acknowledges the ubiquity of evil, and it reckons with tragedy but does not succumb to it.

As Albert Murray insists, the goal of the music is to stomp the blue devils, not to let them prevail. In the lectures entitled The Hero and the Blues, he explains:

“The whole point of the blues idiom lyric is to state the facts of life. Not unlike ancient tragedy, it would have the people for whom it is composed and performed confront, acknowledge, and proceed in spite of, and even in terms of, the ugliness and meanness inherent in the human condition. . . . Not by rendering capitulation tolerable, however, and certainly not by consoling those who would compromise their integrity, but—in its orientation to continuity in the face of adversity and absurdity — the blues idiom lyric is entirely consistent with the folklore and wisdom underlying the rugged endurance of the black American.”

Just so, I would say. But the music itself is a crucial dimension of a comedic itinerary because it transforms the blues lyric by repetition — the opening statement of the tragic facts isn’t left untouched, it’s revised in and by retrospect. The second verse of the traditional 12-bar blues repeats the first verbatim while simultaneously altering its meaning by changing the pitch, moving from the I chord (the tonic) to the IV (the subdominant), for example from E to A, and the third verse then responds to the call of the first two with new words and another pitch, the V chord (the dominant), B. The basic harmonic structure of the I-IV-V-I chord progression—the sound of post-Renaissance western music—is preserved, but it, too, is transformed by instrumental “fills” or solos that, by drawing on the minor pentatonic and bending the notes of that scale, remind the listener of the dissonant Others who came from the margins of modern European empires.

Ryan Coogler opens “Sinners” with a visual and voice-over reminder of those margins, where Irish fiddlers and West African griots made their music—it’s a swirling tapestry that comes to life in the later juke joint scenes, where it’s fleshed out by figures from both pre- and post-colonial times, playing instruments, wearing costumes, dancing sinuously, joyfully, even subway style, to music that sounds familiar to everyone in the scene, and to us, because it sounds vaguely like the blues. At this moment, the simultaneity of different times or stages of history becomes visible as well as audible. The voice-over makes it explicit, invoking “spirits from the past and the future.”

Except that by that time, October 15, 1932, in the Deep South, those Celtic musicians have been recast as hillbillies, or what is the same thing, vampires who play banjo and guitar. They’re already immortal, but they want—as vampires, they need—to be invited into the musical space where Sammy the preacher’s son has been playing what he thinks is Charlie Patton’s old National Steel guitar, what we in the audience know as the acoustic instrument that was present at the creation of both Delta blues and “country music” (the metallic resonators that amplified this guitar’s sound informed Les Paul’s experiments with solid-body electrification in the 1930s and 40s, and meanwhile led toward the laptop Dobro). These were the miscegenated musics that people heard on the radio and through their phonographs in the late 1920s and into the 30s.

But the white folks want to take possession of what Sammy’s got—“I want your stories, and I want your songs,” says Remmick, the vampire leader, which means he must have the bluesman’s soul—and they’ll kill all the black folk in sight to make their claim to his talent effective. And nobody here does get out alive, except Preacher Boy Sammy, who splits Remmick’s skull with the steel top of that guitar and makes his way to Chicago, there to end his career playing a Stratocaster in a tiny, dingy blues club.

That is where the movie ends, too, on the night of October 16, 1992, with a visit to the club from Stack, one of the twin brothers who, having fought in the Great War, became Chicago gangsters, made (or stole) a fortune, and returned to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to buy an old sawmill from the local Klan leader and open that juke joint. The other brother, Smoke, is long gone, having saved Sammy from Remmick, then died taking methodical, military-style vengeance on the Klansmen who of course gathered on the morning after the slaughter to reclaim the mill by force— this was, after all, the Jim Crow South, where nothing could buy a black man’s freedom, not even cash money. Shades on, Stack strides into the club with Mary the white girl (but her daddy was half black) from Clarksdale, the woman who turned him into a vampire sixty years ago, the same woman whose mother raised the twins once they’d driven their abusive father from home. He tells Sammy that Smoke made him promise to let the bluesman live out his life, to preserve the legacy of the music reborn in the Delta and electrified in the big city.

Now Smoke was the real gangster, the brother who had insisted that the juke joint’s customers pay in hard cash, not the wooden nickels the plantation owners paid the sharecroppers and hired hands who picked the cotton, which were tokens redeemable only at the landlord’s store. Stack was the realistic romantic who knew better than to expect that equivalents would be exchanged in either space—or that equality between black folk and white people could be bought by any means of exchange available in the Jim Crow South. “We was never gon’ be free,” he tells Smoke as he explains why immortality as a vampire is better than life indentured to the legal tender of white supremacy. But it was Smoke who saved Preacher Boy Sammy by delivering him both from evil and to the Devil—from the vampires, then from the law of his father as told in the gospel, and finally to the hometown of urban blues, Chicago, which was, the brothers agreed, just another plantation “with tall buildings,” a place where the jagged edges of racist exploitation had been smoothed and systemized by the law, not adjourned.

Each in his own way, then, both the brothers know there’s no escape from the bondage of life on this earth—except death. You can’t buy your way out, and taking your revenge on the white man is a suicide mission. Religious worship is another dead end, as Preacher Boy’s daddy demonstrates with his choice of insipid church music and his demand that his son “drop the guitar” and turn to God for salvation. At the hour of his certain death at the hands of Remmick, Sammy does reach for that alternative, beginning with “Our Father, who art in heaven,” but the vampire and his minions know the Lord’s Prayer as well as any Christian would — and so it becomes a chorus as the leader explains that it still brings him comfort even though the men who stole his father’s land in Ireland “forced these words upon us.”

Earlier that day, Delta Slim, the blues harp player from Clarksdale, had preached a similar sermon on the same religion in a back room of the juke joint, with Preacher Boy as his only but eager congregant. Like Remmick, he’s trying to explain the lasting, even sacred significance of a music that is proudly profane, made from sounds that are both in and of this world. “The blues wasn’t foist on us like that religion,” Slim says, eyes wide, “We brought this from home. . . . We hear our people, and we be free.”

But can the blues set you free? That is the question both movies ask. The prior question, the one Delta Slim forces on us by using the first person—”We,’ “us,” and “our —is, who owns the blues? Can white people claim it as theirs, and if so, how so? By the physical violence of the vampires and the Klansmen in the Delta, by the linguistic chicanery of the lawyers in the tall buildings of the urban plantations — or, as Elvis and then Bob Dylan would have it, by “owning” but not possessing the music, by treating it as a common place, where the simultaneity of different times and the similitude of different peoples become audible?

The immortal Stack sounds like Pete Seeger the representative of authentic folk music when he visits Sammy in Chicago on October 16, 1992. “I don’t like that electric shit as much as the real,” he says, after telling Preacher Boy that he and Mary have collected all the bluesman’s records. Stack doesn’t know what the movie has made clear to the audience, that the blues is the connective tissue of a folk tradition that spans oceans and races as well as centuries: “I miss the real,” he says. Then he turns his vampire eyes on Sammy and asks, “Still got the real in you?” The next thing we see is a National Steel guitar nestled in its case. It can’t be the one Sammy used to split Remmick’s skull, but it looks old enough to be Charlie Patton’s, and it sounds just like it did on the road to Clarksdale, when Preacher Boy thought he was finally free of his father’s faith, auditioning for Stack in the passenger seat of that fancy red Model A, singing the blues.

Still, the sight and sound of that guitar also recall Corinthians 1:10-13, the bible verse Sammy had recited from memory at his father’s command right before Stack arrived to whirl him and the National Steel, a family heirloom, away from the church. The King James version goes like this: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

Preacher Boy hears his way to escape the plantation in the blues. Is that what Dylan heard in Mike Bloomfield’s electric guitar, an escape from the temptation to stay the same, a release from the urge to remain faithful to his origins—did he hear in the blues the kind of freedom he needed to claim the entirety of the American experience as his own? Is that exit from the nightmare of the abiding present what James Mangold and Ryan Coogler have made audible, thus intelligible, in the most visual of media?

If so, if that is what we can hear in “Like a Rolling Stone” and see in these movies, it’s an undiscovered country, a complete unknown that is still hanging in the air, still waiting to be explored, because we haven’t been willing to reckon with the tragedy of American history long enough to hear the blues as the comedic musical form that keeps time running backward and forward, toward the nation conceived in slavery but dedicated nonetheless to the self-evident truth of the proposition that, someday, all men and women will know each other as equals. Instead we—if there is a “we, the people” left in us fractious Americans—have stubbornly indulged the temptation to silence the voices of the strangers in our midst, to close the borders between the disintegrating past and the impending future, to forget that there’s a difference between who we are and what we might become. We aren’t ready to share a dance floor with the Others of our own making.

So conceived, in view of these movies, the blues still figures as the map we need of the borderland once known as the frontier—it’s a portal to the future, but not an escape from the past. For this music would have us dwell on the atrocities carried out in the name of white supremacy, among other lost causes, not evade, ignore, or repress them. And yet it won’t let us rest easy in the repose mourning demands, or seated in a concert hall, as if the past is now dead and gone. The blues would have us redeem this past by making it usable, durable, and significant in the present, something to learn from as well as about. For it’s the music that makes us want to get up and dance with the Devil himself.

What I’ve been up to at Facebook:

March 10. You read Thomas Friedman for the same reason you watch truly awful movies or note subway and student dress codes: they give you a sense of what the future holds, as the themes and the tropes developed in these depths are recapitulated but sublimated, “dignified” by more consequential thinkers, auteurs, and designers.

From this perspective, today’s column should be read as a preemptive rationale for the nihilism—the death wish—that drives Trump and Netanyahu toward the destruction of civilization via the obliteration of Iran. The headline is “Trump Has No Idea How to End the War With Iran.” The column announces that neither does Tom.

No matter what the issue, foreign or fiscal policy, this is a guy used to proposing “grand bargains” to solve whatever problem came his way. And this is a guy who made his bones as a fabled foreign correspondent, reporting from Beirut. Today, in a covert rehabilitation of Curtis LeMay’s strategy in Vietnam, he announces that bombing Iran back to the stone age is our best bet.

Here is the concluding paragraph; the “process” he refers to is the hope that once the bombing stops, Iran’s ruling elite will break into warring factions:

“The best that the Trump-Netanyahu bombs-away strategy can do is start that process; just tilting Iran onto a better track where it is less of a threat to its own people and neighbors would be a significant achievement. The worst the strategy can do is so devastate Iran with endless aerial bombardments that it becomes ungovernable for anyone. That would be a disaster of incalculable proportions.”

My comments (on my own post!):

(1) Drop Site quotes an Iranian official to the effect that the regime can sustain the pace of drone and missile launches for six months. Also quoted is a defense analyst who makes it clear that Iran has no intention of inflicting loss on American personnel-—its goal is to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, from which follows: (a) massive economic damage, both global and domestic, which Trump can neither abide nor pay for, and (b) the loss of American credibility with states in the region that have looked to the US for security guarantees. In short, Iran now has better cards to play than the US does under Trump’s feckless leadership: it can’t dictate the terms of war’s end, but neither can Israel.

(2) Is it conceivable that a better ending for this story will be told by Iranians, rather than Americans as “led” by “their” president, the most depraved “man” on the planet, and/or by Israelis as led by their prime minister—no scare quotes: 93% of Israeli’s approve of the war on Iran—who is quite possibly the most vile person on earth? I ask the question because the existing Iranian regime might win this war or, more likely, create a stalemate, even after being bombed back to the stone age. Richard Drayton describes a scenario that may well play out over the coming weekend—a full-scale invasion with “boots on the ground.” I don’t think it will happen because the economic risks are too high. But if it does, will the Revolutionary Guard prevail?

(3) And the reason there is no anti-war movement is that it isn’t necessary. Movements are convened to create public opinion, to change the course of the river that is the mainstream. We ARE the fucking mainstream this time without even trying, and the maniacs in the White House know it.

March 9. Thanks for the sources, y’all. [I asked for verification on reports about Iran’s attacks on US radar installations and US attacks on an unarmed Iranian vessel.]

Here to tell you that even the staid Economist is on the verge of panic because the oil crisis (its words) caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran is already verging on catastrophic, and it shows no sigh of abating. The benchmark price of Brent crude has gone from roughly $70 to $120 per barrel, and West Texas Intermediate has also spiked. Gas prices at the US pump have risen about 40 percent as a result.

The petrostates of the Gulf region have cancelled supply contracts by invoking force majeure, which allows them to escape liability in cases of unforeseen disaster like war, leaving East and South Asia vulnerable, but also driving up natural gas prices in Europe by 92 percent almost overnight. Talk about supply chain disruption. We ain’t seen nothing yet, because it’s not just the effective closure of Hormuz that’s moving the market: Iran is still attacking other regional infrastructure.

The lunatics and morons who believe that Trump is playing 3-dimensional chess see this moment as American leverage against China, but that is the equivalent of the Slave Power’s delusional belief that the UK would have no choice but to recognize its dependence on cotton exports from the South and, accordingly, to finance the Confederacy’s war for independence.

The different brand of lunatics and morons who say, “Yeah, but at least we got rid of the misogynist bad guy” are in some measure even worse than the true believers in Bibi’s holy war, because they are complicit in the evisceration of democracy at home as well as abroad to the precise extent that they claim the end justifies the means—that the rule of law need not be observed if our cause is righteous and the enemy’s is clearly evil.

The supply chain disruption is this instance is an interruption in the flow of reason and foresight, which has been choked off by the courtiers at the throne of POTUS. There is no Plan B because Plan A had already been outsourced, to Israel.

And so that passing reference to the Slave Power is not misplaced, after all. To be recognized as such, the master must obliterate the free will of the slave; but insofar as he succeeds in this regard, he erases the source of the recognition he seeks. That is the existential nullity that the success of Plan A—the destruction of the Iranian regime—will bring. And with it, we can expect the inevitable return of the repressed, in metastasized shapes and sizes: more violence, more misogyny, more terror, more death. Welcome to the zero-sum world brought to you by Trump, Netanyahu, Miller & Bondi.

It has dawned on me over the last 24 hours that what was so disturbing about Pete Hegseth's press briefing—and what justifies the word "childish" in characterizing it—is the simple fact that it was a celebration of killing, as such.

Not even Achilles, the warrior par excellence, was merely bloodthirsty: he understood that his reputation, his legacy, his immortality, would depend on the cause for which he fought and his honorable conduct on the field of battle (he paid the ultimate price for violating the extant rules of engagement and defiling Hector’s body). He was an expert at killing—nobody was better at it—but that was not the point. For Hegseth and the fascist personality he embodies, it is.

That is what it means to say this is a “reality check,” not an announcement of “mission accomplished,” as per the neoconservative formula of “nation-building.” The killing—the ongoing imposition of pain and death on the adversary in the present, participial tense—that is the point.

“America is winning,” he crowed, in the opening of his briefing. Notice two things about the elaboration of this trope. [See below for excerpts from the transcript of the briefing]

First, it inverts the metaphorical vector of sports talk, wherein fans and commentators alike use the images of war to describe the physical and mental exertions of athletic competition (“in the trenches,” “the smell of victory,” etc.). They adopt that usage because it enhances the drama on the field of play. Hegseth turns it upside down by comparing the use of American military power to a UFC cage match between mismatched opponents (“punching down,” “toe-to-toe”) and to a lop-sided football game in which one team blitzes the other to the point where the other is totally demoralized (“they don’t know what plays to call, let alone how to get in the huddle.and call those plays”).

Second, “winning” is domination—it doesn’t mean a victory to be followed by binding up wounds, reconciling differences, and restoring equilibrium or articulating the conditions of a new one, the plane of aftermath on which the metaphors of war and sport do become commensurable. It means instead the annihilation of the other’s will to fight, to resist, to exist as a sentient, sovereign entity. It’s a zero-sum game: as Iran’s capabilities “evaporate,” those of America “accelerate.” Hegseth here fleshes out the perverse and yet enduring concept of freedom that has been the dark matter of American political thought, and that even now, as I write, organizes and galvanizes MAGA Nation.

We’re all too familiar with Isaiah Berlin’s “two concepts of liberty,” a commonplace of political theory that posits, on the one hand, a “negative,” more or less liberal notion of freedom, which valorizes the autonomy of the individual by enfranchising each person with rights that guarantee release from external power, particularly the power of the state; and, on the other hand, a “positive,” more or less republican notion, which valorizes the access of all persons to the powers of the state as the means by which each individual can achieve what his or her natural talent, learned skills, and past effort would allow, other things being equal.

We are much less familiar with the two concepts of freedom which have competed, and sometimes collaborated, in American culture and politics since the 17th century. One derives from, and idealizes, the experience of white male supremacy that reached its apogee under the regime of antebellum slavery, but that, as Jefferson Cowie poignantly demonstrated in a recent book—and that the administrations’s war on DEI continues to amplify—has never expired. This is freedom conceived, experienced, and understood as the product of an individual’s independence from and domination of others. Community convened on the basis of equality looks accordingly, like the enemy of individuality.

The other derives from, and idealizes, the experience of multicultural, trans-national citizenship that reached its apogee under the banner of the civil rights movement, but that, as any number of books and essays from the last half-century have demonstrated, has deep roots in the 19th-century social movements that revolved around the cause of anti-slavery. This is freedom conceived, experienced, and understood as the product of the interdependence and mutuality of all individuals. Community convened on the basis of equality looks, accordingly, like the sine qua non of individuality.

Hegseth’s press briefing was a performance of freedom as domination. It requires the control or the manipulation, and even, if necessary, the mutilation, of the actual, physical bodies of others, whether these are females who are naturally subject to patriarchal supervision of familial sexuality, or external threats to the American body politic who have made themselves subject to its firepower.

That is why Hegseth’s emphasis was on the complete abjection, the annihilation, the killing, of the enemy, not the purpose of making war on another sovereign state—and why the deployment of the sports metaphor in reverse was appropriate. Bodies are at issue, in play, at the mercy of unbound weaponry. And it’s a zero-sum game, in which America’s dominion expands insofar as the sovereignty of other nations contracts, in which the white male individual’s freedom accumulates insofar as he can subordinate others to his will and, to that extent, remain independent of them.

This is a childish imperative, of course, which descends from the experience of infantile omnipotence, when sounds, gestures, and the occasional “magic words” would summon the Gods who could supply nourishment and other material comforts. But that archaic imperative was then ratified by the lived experience of the patriarchal head of household who presided over the labor-time and the sexual energies of his wife and their offspring; it was magnified by the standing of the slaveholder, who could be recognized as a master only by making the will of the enslaved his own (and in doing so extinguished the source of that recognition).

That imperative, and the murderous rage it entails, have now been resurrected under the regime of the man child who would be king.

__________

Here are excerpts from the Hegseth press briefing, with my italics:

“Well, good morning. I stand before you today with one unmistakable message about Operation Epic Fury: America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy. Under the direct command of President Trump, the War Department unleashed this operation early Saturday morning, just four days ago, which means we need to remember two things.

“First, we are only four days into this. Metrics are shifting, dust is settling, and more forces are arriving. It’s very early. And as President Trump has said, we will take all the time we need to make sure that we succeed.

“Second, we are only four days into this, and the results have been incredible, historic really. Only the United States of America could lead this, only us. But when you add the Israeli Defense Forces, a devastatingly capable force, the combination is sheer destruction for our radical Islamist Iranian adversaries. They are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities just four days in.

“Starting last night and to be completed in a few days, in under a week, the two most powerful Air Forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies, uncontested airspace. I hope all the folks watching understand what uncontested airspace and complete control means. It means we will fly all day, all night, day and night finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders, flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power every minute of every day. until we decide it’s over. . . .

“Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be. Thus far, Operation Epic Fury has delivered twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003, minus Paul Bremer and the Nation Building.

“The campaign has seven times the intensity of Israel’s previous operations against Iran during the 12-day war, seven times. And as President Trump said, more and larger waves are coming; we are just getting started. We are accelerating, not decelerating. Iran’s capabilities are evaporating by the hour. While American strength grows, fiercer smarter and utterly dominant. . . .

“Much was made of the volume of missiles Iran was able to shoot in the first few days and sadly, as we projected, a few got through and killed six of our best who will hopefully arrive home soon. We will avenge them, no doubt.

“But I liken Iran’s predicament to a football team who scripted the first 20 plays of a game. The team knew what plays to run because their first few drives were scripted. But now that the game has started and the blitz is on, they don’t know what plays to call, let alone how to get in the huddle and call those plays.

At top, February 10, In Willemstad, Curacao, our first night there, from the outdoor restaurant we found downtown. A strange place, this, stretched on a rack like Picasso’s Spain as rendered by John Berger, where you can touch and feel the palpable evidence of the slave trade organized by the Dutch West India Company, beginning in 1634, and meanwhile experience the immediate effects of post-industrial modernity, and you don’t have to visit the air-conditioned museums to do so. A semi-arid climate, constant E-W trade winds at 15-20 mph, 84 degrees every day but no beaches except man-made ones, a Royal Dutch Shell oil refinery built in 1915 to process Venezuelan crude now rusting behind concertina wire, and an entire city shut down for Carnival over the weekend of February 14-15.

At bottom, February 23rd, in Harlem, that’s me standing at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox/MX, just off the subway on the second day of the blizzard. And below, the Upper West Side erlier that day, when the snow was still coming down.

Hereafter, some almost random thoughts from the last week.

__________

February 27. With his refusal of Hegseth’s demands, Dario Amodei of Anthropic now emerges as the (possible) exception that proves the rule of our time, which is that the ruling class is no longer. Once upon a time, there was such a thing, and you could measure its presence in three ways:

(1) the existence of a “goal-integrating elite” that was able to recruit real talent across class lines, most crucially among journalists, intellectuals, and academics;

(2) a willingness to sacrifice short-term profit in the name of long-term political stability, an equilibrium achieved by maintaining social mobility, creating “equal opportunity,” and meeting the expectations of a people who take for granted the assumptions embedded in the the Declaration and the rights inscribed in the Constitution;

(3) a genuine belief that capitalism and social democracy of the New Deal kind were not only compatible, but that each was necessary to sustain the other, mainly because both required the rule of law as their necessary if not sufficient condition.

By these measures, the social death of a ruling class has been impending since the 1970s, when the Trilateral Commission announced that social democracy had become a threat to capitalism, and when Milton Friedman’s inane ideas about markets and the social obligations of capital carried the day. Since then, it’s been “every man for himself,” and so any claim that capitalism is superior to all other social systems—in terms of either morality or efficiency—has looked ridiculous. Amodei, who has been sounding the alarm on AI as against most of the Tech Bros, now presents himself as a figure who recalls the social ethic of an older, and probably archaic, ruling class . A belated gesture, but not yet farcical.

February 26. Is there anything more to say about the SOTU? Can any commentary be less tedious than the thing itself? Every pundit (except the stooges at CBS and FOX News) said the same thing, viz., of course Trump lied, fantastically, in accordance with the delusional belief that he has retrieved “America” from crisis, carnage, weakness, decay . . . But did he? Or was he simply assuming what his constituents do, that “they’re crazy,” meaning that

Democrats = the radical/Marxist/antifa Left = un-American = less than persons (primates, possibly) = not created equal = disposable, incarcerable, exportable, and so on? He wasn’t lying, which means disregarding the truth, he was speaking the truth. He believes it, and so does his base. That’s what we’re up against. We are the overwhelming majority—but that doesn’t matter to Trump and his followers, because we don’t count as Americans.

February 20. SCOTUS strikes down Trump’s invocation of emergency in imposing his ridiculous tariffs. The Empire Strikes Back in the name of civil society, that is, on behalf of private enterprise, as against the corrupt crony capitalism Trump has tried to invent and enforce by executive order? Possibly. Leonard Leo has money to burn, so maybe he brought this suit because he realized that the dicktatorship of the blowhards and the bullies is bad for business in the long run. That possibility makes the surrender of the big law firms and the elite universities all the more mystifying. The Tech Bros are morons who happen to understand algorithms, so explaining their behavior is a no-brainer. But those other bastions of civil society . . . ?

February 17. RIP, Jesse Jackson. When the wranglers had us Mamdani volunteers explain what had brought us to Marcus Garvey Park, from there to canvass in Harlem, I said, “Well, I canvassed for Harold Washington in 1983, in Chicago, where I was living, and I canvassed for Jesse Jackson in 1988, in Charlotte, where I was living, and now, well, I’ve lived here for 17 years and Zohran Mamdani sounds to me like those guys, only better.” My friend Mike Fennell ran Jesse’s campaign in Mecklenberg County, where Charlotte is the big city, and by God Jackson won. But canvassing for him in neighborhoods where the rednecks and the Fuck Brothers [see: Kid Rock, the prototype and exemplar] lived felt a little dangerous back in 1988.