Reading this New York Times report on Eric Adams’ dropping out of the race—where Adams is described, with no sense of irony, as “politically moderate” and is quoted as warning against Mamdani’s desire to “destroy the very system we built together over generations” while Cuomo is quoted as saying, “We are facing an existential threat in an extreme radicalism that threatens the existence of this city as we know it”—it dawns on me that we on the left are being presented with a golden opportunity. An opportunity that reminds me, seriously, of something only Lincoln was able to pull off. Zohran Mamdani is running now against Andrew Cuomo, a corrupt sexual harasser, who has been aided from the start by […]
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Categories
Economies, Law, The Left, The Right
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Tags Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, Eric Adams, Greg Grandin, James Oakes, Matt Karp, Zohran Mamdani
I hate to be that guy on the left, but I’m going to be that guy on the left. One of the arguments Republicans are making tonight about the firing of Jimmy Kimmel is that while they’re unhappy and uncomfortable with the head of the FCC’s threatening to pull ABC’s license, they’d be absolutely fine if the network simply made its own decision, sans government pressure, to fire Kimmel. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said to NBC, “Well, my preference would always be to let the companies make economic market decisions.” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican from South Dakota, said, “I understand that right now it’s an employer-employee issue, and that’s the way I would approach it.” As if there were […]
News from the world that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are making for us.
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Categories
Economies, Education, Jews, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right
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Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Eric Adams, John Deere, Lisa Cook, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Northwestern, Zohran Mamdani
Caleb Crain has a lovely post on re-reading Moby Dick for the umpteenth time, but in his 50s. He writes: What’s it like to read Moby-Dick when you’re Ahab’s age? There are probably a number of things I no longer see as acutely as when I had young eyes, but some elements are now in sharper focus. When young, I had only the vaguest sense, in any given chapter, where Ishmael was, geographically speaking. For me then, the important seas to be swimming through were of metaphor and feeling. Now I see that Melville is actually pretty careful to map the Pequod’s journey; in late middle age, my internal GPS module keeps better track of where I as a reader […]
In early modern Venice and Florence, a new form of pooling capital emerged. It was called the “compagnia,” which translates into English as “company.” The literal meaning of the word is “with bread.” Why and how does “with bread” produce a notion of pooling capital and our modern word for an economic enterprise? Because those capital-pooling efforts were often family efforts. The early modern Italian usage points us forward and backward in time. Forward because, in recent years, there’s been a big literature on the rise or return of “family capitalism” or “dynastic capitalism” or “patrimonial capitalism.” Where the 20th century was supposed to be the realm of the managerial corporation, with control and ownership separated, and ownership in the […]
Contemporary scholars, pundits, and politicians often describe Social Security as a social insurance program, which each of us pays into during our working years, that, one day, will protect us and other older people against the ravages of poverty. That description ticks all the boxes of contemporary piety: virtue (you worked for it); prudence (social insurance, setting money aside for a rainy day); fairness (reducing poverty); compassion (for the elderly). But just take a look for a minute at how Social Security was pushed in 1939 by the Roosevelt administration. “A monthly check to you—for the rest of your life.” The phrasing and imagery spill out and over with promises of the good life. That once was the program of […]
The Forward has been running a series of articles about a group in northern Arkansas that owns adjacent tracts of land that Jews and non-whites are forbidden to purchase or live on. On Thursday, the attorney general of Arkansas said this was legal. The details are complicated—mostly focused on the fact that there’s been no purchase or sale or business transaction yet, so nothing formally violating the law—but the significance of this story for thinking about Israel and Zionism is not. The Arkansas group is called Return to the Land, and it is part of a larger national movement. Focusing on people’s proof of “ancestral heritage,” it seeks, according to its mission statement, to “put land [in the United States] […]
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Categories
Economies, Jews, Law, Palestine and Israel, Race, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Arkansas, Jewish National Fund, Return to the Land, The Forward
Marxists, particularly those of an academic or scholastic persuasion, often claim that people misread Marx, especially Capital. Spend fifteen minutes on the internet talking about Marx, and you’ll soon enough get a Marx bro telling you you’ve got it all wrong. He’ll cite chapter and verse to you. Actually, he’ll seldom cite chapter and verse. Usually, he’ll just cite name upon name. “You need to Hegel.” “You need to Althusser.” He won’t show you precisely you’ve got it wrong or where particularly you’re misreading. But he’ll tell you, you’ve got it wrong. Lately I’ve begun to wonder about a political project—no, not just a political project, but a world-building project—that’s tied to a text that almost everybody thinks everybody else […]
The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth. In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
I’m not a fan of Billy Ackman for several reasons, but nothing has roused my ire more than than this: Because of Ackman, I now have to write about sports, which is something I never talk about unless it’s to make fun of it. For those of you who don’t follow such things, Ackman bought his way into some sort of big tennis match with a lot of big tennis pros. He sucked and lost, prompting Martina Navratilova to mockingly tweet of him, “Oh to have the confidence…” She might have added: “…of a very rich white man.” I can’t understand all the ins and outs of this story, except that his buying his way into this match took away […]
I’m seldom one to ride the “we’ve never seen anything like this before” bandwagon. But after reading enough headlines like this one below— —I start to reconsider. The amount of unnecessary death that we tolerate in this country—not just within one group but across many groups, states, and regions, from school shootings to heat waves to floods to fires to covid and now to measles and assassinations—is astounding. “Tolerate” isn’t quite the right word because that sounds like some sort of longstanding practice or habit we’ve accepted for years and decades. But this kind of toleration is new. It’s not the product of ancient holdovers or superstitions or lack of knowledge. It’s an attitude to new forms of destruction that […]
One of the principles of the Zohran Mamdani campaign that is not getting sufficient attention is the second sentence of his platform: The goal is to “make life easier” for New Yorkers. I come at this from two angles. Let me start with the personal. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older—I’m now 57—and became a parent at 40, when I had less energy than I had when I was in my 20s, which wasn’t a lot to begin with. But I’ve become increasingly cognizant over the lifetime of my child and my time as a parent, just how difficult everyday life is, what a struggle it is to deal with daily needs and demands, and how much of […]
Gazillionaire Bill Ackman says that he is “gravely concerned” by the possibility of Mamdani getting elected mayor because rich people are going to flee New York and the city will become “economically unviable.” Paul Krugman says this kind of talk is nothing more than “hysteria” from “the moguls of madness.” I know Krugman only won the Nobel Prize in Economics while Ackman is a rich Trump supporter whose major achievement is getting the first Black woman president of Harvard fired, but who are you going to believe? But here’s the really creepy thing about Ackman’s position. According to Forbes: Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said he and his wealthy associates are ready to pour “hundreds of millions of dollars” into the […]
Now that Zohran Mamdani has won the New York City mayoral primary, the New York Times is asking the question, “Zohran Mamdani Says He’s a Democratic Socialist. What Does That Mean?” The article doesn’t provide much of an answer. Instead, it trots out my old bête noire, Sheri Berman, who offers up crisp nuggets of wisdom like this: “These labels are fuzzy.” If only the Times editors read their own paper. In the wake of the Bernie campaign and AOC’s election, the Times asked me to write a piece explaining the meaning of democratic socialism for a new generation. Since I think the piece holds up, and helps us understand some of the particular appeal of the Mamdani campaign—his focus […]
People, particularly political scientists, don’t often read Rip Van Winkle anymore, which is a shame because it’s a story about change in America and how it’s perceived. A man falls asleep before the American Revolution, wakes up after it, and discovers the world has been completely transformed, down to the tiniest details of society. Now imagine a man who fell asleep in 2005. A Republican president has been bombing the shit out of a Middle Eastern country that begins with an I. He’s been cutting taxes for rich people. The New York Times has been warning that Social Security cuts are necessary to preserve its solvency. The man wakes up in 2025. And everyone is saying the world has changed.
Where would we be without the market? The stock market, the bond market, the financial markets in general—all of these institutions, journalists tell us, are the ultimate, perhaps only, check on President Trump’s power. Esteemed scholars reassure us of the same—that the world’s oldest constitution is backstopped by Wall Street and the dollar. Investors, the argument goes, need their investments protected. The courts, independent and powerful, can provide that protection. Threaten the courts, and the markets will tumble, and the dollar will drop. It is capitalism, in other words, and not citizens or politicians, that will force the White House into compliance with the courts and the Constitution. This faith in capitalism is both novel and strange. Historically, people have feared that capitalism undermines the sovereignty of the state and […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Law, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Adam Smith, Donald Trump, East India Company, Elon Musk, Michał Kalecki, William Douglas
In 2008 or thereabouts, society launched an experiment: What happens when grownups give smart phones and related technologies to kids? Less than twenty years, and a rampant teenage mental health crisis, later, we have the results, and a majority of states are banning or limiting phones in classrooms. In 2020, we launched an experiment, because we had no other choice, using online technologies for teaching students of all ages, down to kindergarten and pre-k, and dramatically reducing or eliminating in-person instruction and contact entirely. Most of us now back in the classroom, in real life, have a pretty good sense of how that experiment, however necessary it was, turned out. Now, in 2025, the New York Times reports today: OpenAI, […]
Today is the birthday of Thomas Mann, who was born exactly 150 years ago. In honor of Mann, I’m posting this essay I wrote, several years back, about him, The Magic Mountain, covid, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, and late capitalism. The essay never got published, and I’d forgotten about till I read the notification this morning from Lit Hub, that today is his birthday. I first read The Magic Mountain in the summer of 1990, a year after I graduated college and just before I was starting graduate school. I was house-sitting in New Haven and studying German. I didn’t know anyone, and back in those days, that kind of pervasive, seemingly permanent, solitude, made me anxious (nowadays, I struggle […]
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Categories
Economies, Literature, Political Theory, The Left
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Tags Ernest Mandel, late capitalism, Max Weber, The Magic Mountain, Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Werner Sombart, Wolfgang Streeck
Took a break from writing about Marx to walk to the pharmacy in Windsor Terrace, owned by a South Asian family, that never seems to run into supply-chain issues or whatever it is that prevents other pharmacies from having medications when you need them. On the way there and back, I crossed paths with two Orthodox Jews, reading and reciting to each other in Hebrew, as they go to or from shul for Shavuot; a trio of South Asian teenage boys, calling each other “girl” in the informal way that, six months ago, they’d have been calling each other “bro” or “brah”; a chic woman in fancy biking gear, sitting on a bench, speaking Haitian Creole on the phone; two […]
A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon. I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, […]
We know two things about Trump’s administration. First, it has declared war on trans people. Second, it has declared war on the administrative state. To my knowledge, nobody has yet figured out what the precise relationship between these two wars is. Till now. In this very stylish debut at The New Yorker, Paisley Currah explains why the war on trans people is not just the “opening move in a battle against vulnerable groups” or a crude attempt to “fan the flames of right-wing moral panic.” Instead, in banning a critical yet flexible tool for deciding the sex of individuals and populations, the right understands that it can completely undermine a major portion of the modern state as we know it. […]
In a bravura of a post, the historian Adam Tooze dismantles a lot of the cliches—so common to a certain style of Marxism associated with Moishe Postone, and to a deep strain of Heideggerianism—about the Holocaust being the telos, the logical triumph and end game, of industrial capitalism and/or industrial modernity. Tooze also addresses a common misconception regarding the genocide of the Jews: that somehow the obsessive transport of Jews to their death entailed such a massive diversion of material resources and personnel, that it ultimately hurt the German war effort, that even on the Nazis’ own terms and plans for imperial conquest, it was irrational to kill all the Jews. Tooze shows that such a view is an evasion […]
In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]
My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975. I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The documentary is also riveting just as a cinematic experience. If you love the scene and soundscape of New York City film from the 1970s—from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Dog Day Afternoon—you’ll love this documentary. The archival footage alone will bring you back to the feel and time of another place. For me, the film was not just political (more on that below) but also personal. Figures […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Abe Beame, Albert Shanker, Buddy Beame, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford, Hugh Carey, New York City Fiscal Crisis, Svetlana Alexievich, Woody Allen, Zohran Mamdani