Two of my favorite historians, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, are teaching a course, starting in mid-September, at the New York City DSA Academy—yes, an actual socialist school for the left!—that I think will be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog. It’s called “Red New York: A History of the Left in America’s Most Radical City.” Seems pretty timely and relevant, no? There are just five classes, and having listened to both Josh and Steve for years, I can tell you that there are not two people who know more about the NYC and the left and are better pedagogues than these two! Seems like a real treat. You can sign up here.
Gloria Steinem, who just died, said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Hear, hear, for the writing life, and for a woman affirming its centrality, above and beyond other goods and values, including motherhood. Incidentally, one of the really nice things about the unjustly criticized Devil Wears Prada 2 is the last scene, where Meryl Streep says to Anne Hathaway, by way of discussing the sacrifices she has made over the years for her career as a journalist and an editor, including sacrifices foisted on her children, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?” I thought it was a gutsy way to end the movie, particularly […]
It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists. For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have […]
I don’t have a problem with the idea that what wins in New York City is not the same as what wins in Iowa, that the US is a big country with all kinds of diversity, etc. But when I read an article in the New York Times like this—so prominently featuring a photograph like this—I don’t see Iowa, or what a moderate Democrats needs to do to win in Iowa. I see an Upper East Side Jewish guy’s idea of what a moderate Democrat in Iowa looks like and needs to do. Ben Rhodes, who wrote the article, grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, got an MFA at NYU, was so mobilized by a sense […]
I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes. This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated: To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it […]
I’ve been fighting the Nietzsche Wars for nearly two decades now. For those of you not familiar with this epochal struggle, the Nietzsche Wars are the deep disagreements between liberal and left scholars about whether Nietzsche should be considered a right-wing conservative, which is how some of us think of him, or a serious left-wing thinker (few people actually think this anymore) or, short of that, a freeingly apolitical or antipolitical or ambiguously political thinker whose insights are useful to the left. It just occurred to me, however, that all this time we’ve been arguing about the wrong person. The person Team Nietzsche really wants to conscript for its side, and could legitimately conscript, is Heinrich Heine. Now, before everyone […]
Stepping back from today’s Supreme Court rulings to consider the broad cast of the year, there seem to be three main areas in which the Court significantly pushed back on Trump. They are: 1) independence of the Fed; 2) tariffs; 3) birthright citizenship. As it happens, these were three of Trump’s biggest challenges to prevailing conservative and Republican orthodoxy. And on each one, he failed. How to read that failure? I think the simplest explanation is that the Roberts Court is, above all, a neoliberal Court. Trump’s challenge to free trade and independent monetary policy—as well as the idea of the United States being a nation of the people who are born there, not a nation of blood but a […]
In a probing Substack, John Judis writes, “In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as ‘democratic socialist’ in the same way it is now known widely as ‘liberal.’” Before you dismiss this as ideological patter from a political adventurer, you should know that Judis is a relentlessly unenthusiastic realist, who’s been watching and commenting on the American political scene longer than I’ve been alive. I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party in the world—and, as Kevin Phillips famously called it, […]
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Categories
Economies, Political Theory, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Arthur Schlesinger, democratic socialism, John Judis, liberalism, Louis Hartz, New Deal, Philip Roth, Richard Hofstadter
Anxious about DSA’s recent victories, centrist House Democrats have issued a manifesto: “We are capitalist, not socialist.” Worried perhaps that that message may not be clear enough, Long Island Democrat Tom Suozzi elaborates in the New York Times: The people that don’t agree with their [DSA] philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized. The cocktail party circuit, in other words, has to get organized. Suozzi, by the way, represents the two peninsulas where West Egg and East Egg, of Great Gatsby fame, were set.
The BungaBunga podcast had me on to discuss my Nation review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global history. It was an excellent conversation. Both interviewers, Alex Gourevitch and Alex Hochuli, pushed me to think beyond what I had written. Among the issues we discovered in our discussion: Anyway, you can listen to it here or below.
In the June issue of The Nation, I have a review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a long review, in part because it’s a long book. While I wound up being quite critical of the book, I’m more than mindful of what it takes to write such a book. I thought I owed the book, and Beckert, the courtesy of giving it its due. Hence the length. The review may be behind the paywall, so if you cannot access it, you can sign up for a subscription to the magazine or email me, and I can send you a pdf. Many thanks to readers of earlier drafts of the review, particularly Lucas Pinheiro, Joan Scott, Greg Grandin, […]
“JD Vance Gave A Speech To Almost No One.” “Meanwhile, Zohran Is Just Getting Things Done.”
I’ve been following the online debate over the slogan “no kings” with some interest. On the one side, critics argue that it’s a normie notion, which obscures all sorts of questions about imperial war, Palestine, oil, and oligarchy. On the other side, defenders say it appeals to a broad set of values and voters, providing the basis for a popular movement against not just Trump but all the ills he stands for and promotes, not to mention the kind of state he is trying to create and consolidate. Interestingly enough, as Bruno Leipold shows in his magnificent book, Citizen Marx, Marx struggled with this very question across the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. While most readers associate Marx with the claim […]
If you watch this short clip of Zohran Mamdani getting heckled, you’ll see why he’s the greatest living politician in the United States today. Without batting an eye, Mamdani says, in response to the heckler: I want that man to be able to afford to keep living in New York City. Because the day that I don’t hear him yelling at me, it means he got priced out of this place. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for him. I don’t want that for anybody in this city. We need to make this a city where it’s affordable enough to yell at your politicians. Notice the four things Mamdani is doing. First, he remains unflappable, gracious, calm, […]
According to this latest NBC News poll, 67% of Democrats say that their sympathies lie with Palestinians over Israelis. This is an astonishing sea change in the opinion of a major part of the electorate. Just thirteen years ago, in 2013, only 18% of Democrats said that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. This shift, moreover, is not confined to Democrats. Thirty-seven percent of independents claim that their sympathies lie with the Palestinians; only twenty-seven percent claim that their sympathies lie with the Israelis. In 2013, those numbers were nearly reversed: 37% of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Israelis, while only ten percent of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. As NBC […]
One of the critical distinguishing features of the communist movement of the 19th century was its insistence, in the words of Marx, “that the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.” Where other movements were willing to advocate on behalf of the working class or other oppressed groups, the First International demanded that it be the oppressed who liberated themselves. It may seem a leap from that vision to the fact that all New Yorkers, in the next few years, will get childcare for their two-year-olds, and once that is established, perhaps their younger children as well. But I don’t think it is as much of a leap as we sometimes think. One year ago, […]
I spent yesterday tearing my hair out over the Democrats’ response to Trump’s State of the Union Address. I could say a lot about their choice of respondent and the substance of the response. But I want to focus only on style, rhetoric. Long story, short: I was appalled. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered, outside academia, people with such a bottomless appetite for mountainous piles of meaningless, unnecessary, empty words and phrases, each genetically engineered, in whole or in part, to make any sentient being stop paying attention. Reading this speech, that is the only conclusion I can come to: that the sole purpose of this speech is to make people stop paying attention. Again, forget substance, forget ideology, […]
In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]
It’s interesting how many commentators on Marx’s relationship to Judaism focus on his father’s conversion to Christianity. Marx’s mother also converted to Christianity, and from what we know, hers was a more bitter and forced conversion than his father’s. Marx’s father converted entirely for professional reasons: he would no longer be able to practice as a lawyer if he hadn’t). But Marx’s father wasn’t that bothered by any residual attachment to Judaism or Jewishness, despite the fact that his father and then his brother were the chief rabbis of Trier. Marx’s mother, however, resisted conversion for as long as possible. She insisted on waiting till her father died (she, like her husband, came from a long line of rabbis), and […]
Many have heard of Hitler’s ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch. It took place in Munich in 1923 and landed Hitler in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf. Three years before the Beer Hall Putsch there was a much more serious challenge to the Weimar Republic from the right. It was called the Kapp Putsch. Centered in Berlin, led by high-ranking officers of the military, joined by monarchist and conservative elements, speaking for the Freikorps and beyond, it posed a far more immediate threat to the national government than the failed putsch of three years later. It was stopped by a general strike. That general strike was called by the President of the Weimar Republic—the fairly moderate and plodding leader of the […]
I’m not a subscriber to Liberties, the journal, so I can read only a bit of this article by Susie Linfield, “The Politics of the Hardened Left: The Left Since October 7.” I’m not complaining. Having read a fair amount of Linfield’s work over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what she thinks. And what she’s going to think. Never many surprises there. Which is why I want to comment on this opening statement of her article: Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to […]
Under the headline, “There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro,” Bret Stephens writes: Whether failing to remove the regime is a possibly disastrous oversight or part of a yet-to-be-revealed plan, the administration will have to figure out how to get rid of it for good in favor of a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government. Now Stephens is someone who’s on record as claiming that Trump and/or his regime are fascist, authoritarian, and autocratic. Just this past year, he has compared both to North Korea, Nero’s Rome, and much else. Yet here he is, writing as if it’s a real question as to whether this very same leader and this very same regime can create “a legitimate, stable and democratically […]
The opposition of Jewish voters to Zohran Mamdani has been, and will continue to be, a flash point of commentary and conflict over the mayor. It reminds me a bit of how Black voters were often the flash point of commentary and conflict over Bernie Sanders in 2016. In the last year, Michael Lange has emerged as the sharpest analyst of NYC electoral politics. When it comes to the unlikely campaign and career of Mamdani, hardly anyone has equalled Lange’s record of analysis and prediction. In his latest post, Lange takes on the question of Jewish voters and Mamdani. Long story short: Cuomo performed best…among wealthier and older Jewish voters, while Mamdani performed best among younger Jewish voters and those […]
Like many of you, I woke up this morning to the news that the United States government had attacked Venezuela and captured its president, spiriting him out of the country. Though this part of it got hardly got any notice, two days ago, Jumaane Williams, in his inaugural address as NYC public advocate, explicitly invoked Maurice Bishop, the leader of Grenada where Williams’s family is from, as an influence and an inspiration. Bishop, a left-wing revolutionary, came to power in Grenada in 1979. In 1983, his government began building an airport in Grenada, which made the Reagan regime nervous. As rumblings in the US grew, Bishop was toppled in a coup and executed by forces within his own government. Six […]