When I read Paul Heideman’s Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos in manuscript last year, I instantly recognized it as the most probing, and, likely to be, lasting, analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. The reason is simple. Unlike many analyses of Trump and the right, Heideman takes the political economy and history of big business seriously. Not capitalism, not the working class, though Heideman, as a good democratic socialist cares a great deal about both, but big business. Like no one else thus far, Heideman sees just how fractious are the divisions with the business class and how delicate are the threads binding these factions together, and how that […]
A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook: As the last three days’ events around the failure of the Republicans and Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right. I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painfully, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget. But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that […]
I came to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s work late in life. I had known about her for years; she was a good friend of my friend Karen Orren, the UCLA political scientist, who was constantly urging me to read Wood’s work. But I only finally did that two years ago, at the suggestion of, I think it was, Paul Heideman. I read her The Origins of Capitalism. It was one of those Aha! moments. Wood was an extraordinarily rigorous and imaginative thinker, someone who breathed life into Marxist political theory and made it speak—not to just to me but to many others—at multiple levels: historical, theoretical, political. She ranged fearlessly across the canon, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary social theory, undaunted by […]
The latest issue of Jacobin came out the week before last. It’s already generating a lot of discussion and debate. Just a few highlights. 1. Jonah Birch’s interview with NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber about Chibber’s new book on subaltern studies and postcolonialism theory has pissed a lot of people off. Here’s Chibber: A typical maneuver of postcolonial theorists is to say something like this: Marxism relies on abstract, universalizing categories. But for these categories to have traction, reality should look exactly like the abstract descriptions of capital, of workers, of the state, etc. But, say the postcolonial theorists, reality is so much more diverse. Workers wear such colorful clothes; they say prayers while working; capitalists consult astrologers — this doesn’t […]
It’s been a long while since our last roundup of news of the book. So here goes…. Firedoglake held a salon about The Reactionary Mind today. Rick Perlstein hosted the discussion, lots of people chimed in. Thom Hartmann conducted an interview with me for his show Conversations with Great Minds. I certainly don’t have a great mind, but it was, thanks to Thom, a great conversation. Here’s Part I; here’s Part II. Paul Heideman has a really thoughtful review of the book here, one of the best I’ve read. Though Heideman has some criticisms, he gives a thorough account of the book’s argument. Jeffrey Goldfarb wrote an interesting blog post about the book, which sparked some more interesting discussion. Daniel […]
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Tags Amanda Marcotte, Daniel Beland, Dorian Warren, Firedoglake, Jeffrey Goldfarb, John Holbo, Mark Lilla, Paul Heideman, Rick Perlstein, Robert Kennedy Jr., Thom Hartmann, Thomas Sugrue