On the anniversary of January 6 and other matters
I had two pieces and an interview come out today.
In Politico, I address the anniversary of January 6, arguing that the events of that day have misled us about the real challenges we face. A quick taste:
While scholars warn of fascism on the one side and pundits bicker over wokeness on the other, the larger and longer view reveals how blinkered both of these assessments are. The right’s road to power does not run through street violence, mass rallies, fake news or lawless coups. The left’s weakness has nothing to do with critical race theory and cancel culture. Both claims suffer from the same shortcoming: They focus on the margins rather than the matrix.
Driving the initiatives of the Republicans and the inertia of the Democrats are two forces. The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The second is the Constitution, which makes it difficult for the national majority to act and easy for local minorities to rule. What happened on Jan. 6 is far less significant than what happened before Jan. 6 — and what has and has not happened since then.
I also spoke with Masha Gessen on Jane Coaston’s New York Times podcast The Argument. We talked about January 6, what we’ve learned since then, and the future of democracy in America. Masha is one of the most eloquent and intelligent defenders of the thesis about Trump and authoritarianism that I have been arguing against, so it was a great opportunity to engage with their claims.
Last, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me and a bunch of other scholars what we thought was the best scholarly book of 2021. The choice was easy:
The lifeless biography is a genre with many devoted practitioners. Frances Wilson is not one of them. Dedicated to Keats’s proposition that a “life of any worth is a continual allegory,” Wilson has found, in the owner of the Titanic, moral and psychological mysteries worthy of Joseph Conrad, and, in Dorothy Wordsworth, both the albatross and mariner of Samuel T. Coleridge’s poem.
In Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Wilson turns to D.H. Lawrence and discovers an unexpected vein of autofiction, almost religious in its intensity.
I highly recommend Wilson’s book. There is no other biographer like her out there. You can read more of what I said about the book here.
Happy New Year, all.