Professor John, those of us who revere Literature - let's clear the decks and say Art - do not fare well with any tribe, Right or Left. On the Right: how many more essays by Roger Kimball do we need to read about how Western Civ was knocked off its axis because Marcel Duchamp mounted a urinal in the Armory Show? Shame, shame on all those decadent Modern Artists, Picasso, Pollock, et al., (the same revulsion towards Modern Art, by the way, that became Art-Policy under Stalin and Hitler)! I always want to say, "Roger, maybe the destruction of millions of young men across Europe during WWI had something to do with gutting Western Civ?"
On the Left: Sheesh, where do we start? Your Art (novelstorypaintingmusicplaydancesculpture) sucks because it neither excludes the over represented, nor includes the underserved while over marginalizing the marginalized clearly identified by the 46 letters of the alphabet ....
Woke: Creation of beautiful art can only come about when material conditions allow the luxury of time for superficialities built upon the backs of the working class.
Non-Woke: What about the beautiful cave paintings of Lascaux - when virtually everyone - man woman child - was involved in the foundation of survival? How did such beautiful painting come about?
Woke: [Something incomprehensible]
Both Right and Left conveniently forget that one of the projects of Art is to give us new eyes wherewithal to see, or reimagine, reality. The urinal, taken from its usual place and set in an art show does turn out to be pleasing in shape and design. The crucifixion bathed in urine -- keeping with the Left's exaltation of bodily egress -- turns out to affirm Christian Theology: Yes, Christ inhabited every aspect of man's bio-cycle -- hunger, thirst, sex, urine, poo, heck, he even died -- but he overcame death - speaking of Easter - thanks for the reminder Bob Mapplethorpe.
With this gift of Art the imagination flourishes, madness retreats; in politics, the reverse is true ...
While congratulations on the book coming out are of first order (after wishing you, and all, a Happy Easter) it's a combination of odd and troubling to see you--and Shullenberger--rather taking the unrelenting awfulness of Trump 2 as a sign of having been vindicated in your predictions/prescience/vibecasting.
As someone who was sympathetic to what I understood to be y'all's whole thing a few years ago, much of it seemed (and I thought reasonably so, in 2020-22) to be about articulating a critique of the contemporary left's excesses that was routed through, and thus in its own way a defense of, previously (culturally) left-coded 'grad school Theory'... a critique premised, as it turns out wrongly, on the percetion that the Trumpist right had been knocked out of action, and had never been as 'fascist' or threatening as it had been made out to be in the late 2010s. Now it seems rather that the most prescient people were the screeching MSNBC libs of 2015-6! Our awful political moment is strange stuff out of which to make a victory lap for the 2020-22 'Theory-against-the-libs'.
Not that I think the validity or interestingness of a thinker/writer depends on their being 'right' or able to correctly forecast (or call into existence) trends--if anything, the opposite. I think there's a risk too of narrating oneself as the one who knows the shape of the moment, or who know how the previous moment would produce this one. This seems, ultimately, to be the same kind of cultural criticism as the one that the vanishing Marxists used to practice, in which texts as 'interesting' insofar as the disclose the contradictions about to break open into the next stage of history...
Thank you, and happy Easter! Well, I won't speak for GS, but my point in this post was only that I was well-positioned from my background and education to observe-forecast-critique the current cultural hegemony and the previous one while admitting I'm very ill-positioned to understand what's coming in any detail because (apparently) it will be based on forms of power I don't understand from the inside. Any prescience I might have possessed was contingent and is presently, like the Marxists, vanishing. This is unseemly, but (now maybe I will speak for GS) I think "Theory-against-the-libs" is less taking a victory lap than hurling an I-told-you as the libs' own "norm violations" (of academic freedom or due process, for example, or the idea thereof, or all the civil liberties violations in 2020-21) recoil on them in grotesque forms. In that sense, the previous moment did produce this one, fairly predictably, not in some complex Hegelo-Marxian dialectical process accessible only to the seer but just according to a tit-for-tat logic of escalating reprisals in the absence of once-sturdier self-restraint.
Well, if a few years ago it seemed useful to register of wokeness "this sucks, I hate it," to now remind an imagined "you" (composed of libs?) that we did say it seems, idk, at best pointless given that wokeness was infinitely preferable to what we have now, and there's in fact really no one whom one can grab by the arm reproaching "if only you'd listened!".
But I suppose both the wish for such an addressee, and the reproach to it, show one to still wish for the rule of enlightened liberal elites (the "you" who should have listened)... since I can't imagine trying to speak now even in fantasy to the Right in these terms ("listen to reason... by your own logic... what Theory/Art really teaches is moderation...")... my attempts to address its members in the language of BAP or Rufo for example having gone nowhere, or nowhere good (Rufo did email me after my American Affairs piece on him to ask "ok what should I do?"--and notably did not take my advice not to further persecute academics!)
I was definitely only ever speaking to an imagined enlightened liberal elite interlocutor (except for my occasional attempts to civilize the young groypers, which somebody has to do!). I use "we" a lot as a rhetorical device and that's the "we" I'm imagining/summoning. As you imply, I'm not sure who else I could be addressing in the present circumstance, who else would be a reader for the kind of thing I write.
well I think unfortunately the double enjoining of moderation (via a performance of one's own arias of agon crying themselves out and thus calming themselves down into, at last, a(nti)political reasonableness) to rightwing ephebes and libsters alike in fact chilled out neither--and perhaps was always necessarily at odds with the desire to tell off and tell 'I told you so' (one might say, the 'dissident' intellectual's appeal to the libs was couched in the same register of disdain as libs' appeals to the working class: "why won't you do what I tell you is in your own interest, you loathsome imbecile???") and thus of course ineffective at achieving its supposed aims (although perhaps effective, thus, at bringing about the situation that one purportedly wanted to avoid, ie, the libs being crushed by reactionary 'blowback')...
And the assemblage of people constellated even in the above post as allies in this project of giving warning to the libs, such as Shullenberger (himself allied with the odious Matthew Schmitz of First Things and Ahmari, who back when Compact was founded and not yet perhaps Soros-funded were all about overturning rather than saving the liberal order) and Dee (who seems entirely too cutesy in her 'I'm just fascinated by the discourse' elbow-rubbing with the goon squad), were not I think ever seeking exactly to head off at the pass the terrible political reality we're now faced with--not to say that they wanted it, but there's I think a certain complicity in such people's commentary on (which is also a way of constituting) the 'vibe shift', which was made, in part, of their own desires disguised as observations...
Yes, and I tried to be honest about how this was all true of myself in the hopes that the self-analysis would undo the dissimulation you criticize in your last lines. Partly I was writing for publications and audiences that would have me, but of course I am a petit-bourgeois Catholic schoolboy who tried to class-climb on the literary canon a generation or two too late and was accordingly filled with all the same rage and resentment against "the liberal elite" as other members of the post-left, most of whom, as far as I can tell, fit some or all of my self-description. And the other purpose of the self-analysis was to keep whatever resentment could not be overcome trained on people with some cultural power and not the people without power for whom they claim to speak and, in so doing, unwittingly offer as scapegoats. I tried to stage a revelation of my "own desires disguised as observations" throughout 2024 for whatever it may have been worth to provide myself as a case, rather than as a direct political intervention. Once you start casting these things in terms of complicity, though, it's hard to know where to stop, because very few intellectual-cultural constituencies were satisfied with the status quo for various reasons, and most could be charged with secretly wishing for the libs' defeat.
I'm slightly implicated here, ha, having reposted both the JP and GS pieces this morning. It's droll to say so, but do you really think the 2015 MSNBC libs are vindicated now? Isn't the present scorched earth campaign against polite society something Trump wouldn't have been able to conceive of, much less carry out, in 2016? Or for that matter during his second term, had he been reelected in 2020?
And isn't the main force driving the campaign now a desire for revenge for the humiliations he feels he has been subjected to since 2020? A desire to break the things his enemies cherish, and to watch them mourn?
Which is not to say that the MSNBC libs were wrong to humiliate Trump and his allies during these years, that's all the same to me, but—they were wrong to lose the election last November! They (not JP or GS) are the ones whose failure to understand Trumpism was only dormant deserves to be condemned.
I don't find it droll at all! The libs ofc are wrong to have lost... but now I wish only that the illiberal streak they showed in woke/covid era had been more forcefully and targetingly applied to making Trump’s return legally impossible--even if that meant El Savador style megajail for Viking hat Jan 6 guy!
Sadly one seems to always, since at least Schmitt critiquing Weimar, berate the liberal establishment for its authoritarian practices of self-defense and for its failure to apply them strongly enough to succeed.
I mean, I wrote a lot about how libs should heed the rational kernel of Trump, take on a proper degree of economic and cultural nationalism, reject gender and race insanity, try to route the defense of liberal norms in terms that don't appeal only to technocrats eunuchs... that having failed, I don't take it the failure vindicates me or that message
maybe: your 'rational kernal of Trump' advice was perfectly reasonable, but the Democratic party was set up in such a way that it was impossible that it could be taken, and if you had had the good sense to recognize this you could have spent those years advocating for droning Mar-a-Lago etc instead
Professor John, those of us who revere Literature - let's clear the decks and say Art - do not fare well with any tribe, Right or Left. On the Right: how many more essays by Roger Kimball do we need to read about how Western Civ was knocked off its axis because Marcel Duchamp mounted a urinal in the Armory Show? Shame, shame on all those decadent Modern Artists, Picasso, Pollock, et al., (the same revulsion towards Modern Art, by the way, that became Art-Policy under Stalin and Hitler)! I always want to say, "Roger, maybe the destruction of millions of young men across Europe during WWI had something to do with gutting Western Civ?"
On the Left: Sheesh, where do we start? Your Art (novelstorypaintingmusicplaydancesculpture) sucks because it neither excludes the over represented, nor includes the underserved while over marginalizing the marginalized clearly identified by the 46 letters of the alphabet ....
Woke: Creation of beautiful art can only come about when material conditions allow the luxury of time for superficialities built upon the backs of the working class.
Non-Woke: What about the beautiful cave paintings of Lascaux - when virtually everyone - man woman child - was involved in the foundation of survival? How did such beautiful painting come about?
Woke: [Something incomprehensible]
Both Right and Left conveniently forget that one of the projects of Art is to give us new eyes wherewithal to see, or reimagine, reality. The urinal, taken from its usual place and set in an art show does turn out to be pleasing in shape and design. The crucifixion bathed in urine -- keeping with the Left's exaltation of bodily egress -- turns out to affirm Christian Theology: Yes, Christ inhabited every aspect of man's bio-cycle -- hunger, thirst, sex, urine, poo, heck, he even died -- but he overcame death - speaking of Easter - thanks for the reminder Bob Mapplethorpe.
With this gift of Art the imagination flourishes, madness retreats; in politics, the reverse is true ...
While congratulations on the book coming out are of first order (after wishing you, and all, a Happy Easter) it's a combination of odd and troubling to see you--and Shullenberger--rather taking the unrelenting awfulness of Trump 2 as a sign of having been vindicated in your predictions/prescience/vibecasting.
As someone who was sympathetic to what I understood to be y'all's whole thing a few years ago, much of it seemed (and I thought reasonably so, in 2020-22) to be about articulating a critique of the contemporary left's excesses that was routed through, and thus in its own way a defense of, previously (culturally) left-coded 'grad school Theory'... a critique premised, as it turns out wrongly, on the percetion that the Trumpist right had been knocked out of action, and had never been as 'fascist' or threatening as it had been made out to be in the late 2010s. Now it seems rather that the most prescient people were the screeching MSNBC libs of 2015-6! Our awful political moment is strange stuff out of which to make a victory lap for the 2020-22 'Theory-against-the-libs'.
Not that I think the validity or interestingness of a thinker/writer depends on their being 'right' or able to correctly forecast (or call into existence) trends--if anything, the opposite. I think there's a risk too of narrating oneself as the one who knows the shape of the moment, or who know how the previous moment would produce this one. This seems, ultimately, to be the same kind of cultural criticism as the one that the vanishing Marxists used to practice, in which texts as 'interesting' insofar as the disclose the contradictions about to break open into the next stage of history...
Thank you, and happy Easter! Well, I won't speak for GS, but my point in this post was only that I was well-positioned from my background and education to observe-forecast-critique the current cultural hegemony and the previous one while admitting I'm very ill-positioned to understand what's coming in any detail because (apparently) it will be based on forms of power I don't understand from the inside. Any prescience I might have possessed was contingent and is presently, like the Marxists, vanishing. This is unseemly, but (now maybe I will speak for GS) I think "Theory-against-the-libs" is less taking a victory lap than hurling an I-told-you as the libs' own "norm violations" (of academic freedom or due process, for example, or the idea thereof, or all the civil liberties violations in 2020-21) recoil on them in grotesque forms. In that sense, the previous moment did produce this one, fairly predictably, not in some complex Hegelo-Marxian dialectical process accessible only to the seer but just according to a tit-for-tat logic of escalating reprisals in the absence of once-sturdier self-restraint.
Well, if a few years ago it seemed useful to register of wokeness "this sucks, I hate it," to now remind an imagined "you" (composed of libs?) that we did say it seems, idk, at best pointless given that wokeness was infinitely preferable to what we have now, and there's in fact really no one whom one can grab by the arm reproaching "if only you'd listened!".
But I suppose both the wish for such an addressee, and the reproach to it, show one to still wish for the rule of enlightened liberal elites (the "you" who should have listened)... since I can't imagine trying to speak now even in fantasy to the Right in these terms ("listen to reason... by your own logic... what Theory/Art really teaches is moderation...")... my attempts to address its members in the language of BAP or Rufo for example having gone nowhere, or nowhere good (Rufo did email me after my American Affairs piece on him to ask "ok what should I do?"--and notably did not take my advice not to further persecute academics!)
I was definitely only ever speaking to an imagined enlightened liberal elite interlocutor (except for my occasional attempts to civilize the young groypers, which somebody has to do!). I use "we" a lot as a rhetorical device and that's the "we" I'm imagining/summoning. As you imply, I'm not sure who else I could be addressing in the present circumstance, who else would be a reader for the kind of thing I write.
well I think unfortunately the double enjoining of moderation (via a performance of one's own arias of agon crying themselves out and thus calming themselves down into, at last, a(nti)political reasonableness) to rightwing ephebes and libsters alike in fact chilled out neither--and perhaps was always necessarily at odds with the desire to tell off and tell 'I told you so' (one might say, the 'dissident' intellectual's appeal to the libs was couched in the same register of disdain as libs' appeals to the working class: "why won't you do what I tell you is in your own interest, you loathsome imbecile???") and thus of course ineffective at achieving its supposed aims (although perhaps effective, thus, at bringing about the situation that one purportedly wanted to avoid, ie, the libs being crushed by reactionary 'blowback')...
And the assemblage of people constellated even in the above post as allies in this project of giving warning to the libs, such as Shullenberger (himself allied with the odious Matthew Schmitz of First Things and Ahmari, who back when Compact was founded and not yet perhaps Soros-funded were all about overturning rather than saving the liberal order) and Dee (who seems entirely too cutesy in her 'I'm just fascinated by the discourse' elbow-rubbing with the goon squad), were not I think ever seeking exactly to head off at the pass the terrible political reality we're now faced with--not to say that they wanted it, but there's I think a certain complicity in such people's commentary on (which is also a way of constituting) the 'vibe shift', which was made, in part, of their own desires disguised as observations...
Yes, and I tried to be honest about how this was all true of myself in the hopes that the self-analysis would undo the dissimulation you criticize in your last lines. Partly I was writing for publications and audiences that would have me, but of course I am a petit-bourgeois Catholic schoolboy who tried to class-climb on the literary canon a generation or two too late and was accordingly filled with all the same rage and resentment against "the liberal elite" as other members of the post-left, most of whom, as far as I can tell, fit some or all of my self-description. And the other purpose of the self-analysis was to keep whatever resentment could not be overcome trained on people with some cultural power and not the people without power for whom they claim to speak and, in so doing, unwittingly offer as scapegoats. I tried to stage a revelation of my "own desires disguised as observations" throughout 2024 for whatever it may have been worth to provide myself as a case, rather than as a direct political intervention. Once you start casting these things in terms of complicity, though, it's hard to know where to stop, because very few intellectual-cultural constituencies were satisfied with the status quo for various reasons, and most could be charged with secretly wishing for the libs' defeat.
I'm slightly implicated here, ha, having reposted both the JP and GS pieces this morning. It's droll to say so, but do you really think the 2015 MSNBC libs are vindicated now? Isn't the present scorched earth campaign against polite society something Trump wouldn't have been able to conceive of, much less carry out, in 2016? Or for that matter during his second term, had he been reelected in 2020?
And isn't the main force driving the campaign now a desire for revenge for the humiliations he feels he has been subjected to since 2020? A desire to break the things his enemies cherish, and to watch them mourn?
Which is not to say that the MSNBC libs were wrong to humiliate Trump and his allies during these years, that's all the same to me, but—they were wrong to lose the election last November! They (not JP or GS) are the ones whose failure to understand Trumpism was only dormant deserves to be condemned.
I don't find it droll at all! The libs ofc are wrong to have lost... but now I wish only that the illiberal streak they showed in woke/covid era had been more forcefully and targetingly applied to making Trump’s return legally impossible--even if that meant El Savador style megajail for Viking hat Jan 6 guy!
Sadly one seems to always, since at least Schmitt critiquing Weimar, berate the liberal establishment for its authoritarian practices of self-defense and for its failure to apply them strongly enough to succeed.
I mean, I wrote a lot about how libs should heed the rational kernel of Trump, take on a proper degree of economic and cultural nationalism, reject gender and race insanity, try to route the defense of liberal norms in terms that don't appeal only to technocrats eunuchs... that having failed, I don't take it the failure vindicates me or that message
maybe: your 'rational kernal of Trump' advice was perfectly reasonable, but the Democratic party was set up in such a way that it was impossible that it could be taken, and if you had had the good sense to recognize this you could have spent those years advocating for droning Mar-a-Lago etc instead
I should have told the Soros people (who fund Compact but tragically rejected me!) I was ready to advocate the Liberation of Florida 😭
Do upload the MJE conversation for us poor working saps will you?
We definitely will—sorry if the time is a little awkward but we're coordinating from different parts of the planet.