Look, I now look at a whole lot of conservative stuff online, mostly because it’s currently far less delusional than what one finds on the left. That wasn’t true ten years ago. But I rarely see the kind of stuff Todd is talking about. It’s easy for me to avoid the likes of Gateway Pundit (though, again, that site may have become less reliably nutty). It’s easy to avoid substantially nutty stuff on the right. It’s less easy to avoid the NYT, the WaPo, and the rest.
None of this is supposed to exonerate the right for its biases. It’s just to note that (a) the left has them, too, (b) it currently has more of them, (c) it currently has crazier ones, and (d) it’s currently the mainstream, ergo the effects are more substantial. The right can’t get over its Benghazi obsession. But that shit pales in comparison to Russiagate. There’s no right-wing analog of climate apocalypticism–unless you want to count Christian apocalypticism, which is isolated to the conservative religious fringe. The latter is a joke; the former is the extremely consequential orthodoxy. Twenty years ago, the religious right was less fringy, and fought to get one of its pet theories–creationism–at least mentioned occasionally in schools. It was slapped down hard. Multiple leftist theories–climate hysteria, gender ideology in its myriad forms, multiculturalism, anti-liberal feminism, etc.–pervade education at all levels. In many cases, it’s impermissible to even question them. And we’re on a trajectory toward making questioning some of them illegal. We’re lagging behind other Western democracies in that respect, actually.
As David Warren says about the neoconservatives, “their perceived voyage to the Right was a steadiness as the waters passed them by.” And the waters, they certainly have been a-churning past us as we drift toward the falls. When even the author of the Millennial Bible isn’t safe from being widely attacked as a “bigot” for stating a basic biological truth in the most inoffensive way possible, one which would have been considered utterly uncontroversial a decade ago, it’s clear that something has gone terribly wrong, and if there’s any sane people left on the left, they’re keeping their heads down and mouths shut for now.
Naturally, partisans on both sides are convinced that their enemies are possessed of all the power and money as well as military-like precision and effectiveness in achieving their goals. Both sides are convinced that their own side is hopelessly weak, ineffectual, outnumbered, and divided against themselves. For years, I read left-wing bloggers bemoaning how trying to achieve their political goals was like herding cats. When I started reading more conservative voices, I found them telling the same story. As far as I’m concerned, those narratives cancel each other out, and all that’s left is arguing about the metrics. I’m not sure what could possibly serve as an objective standard of measurement to determine which team is winning the culture war and/or which team is crazier. Every individual sees himself as the lonely voice of reason, with the idiots to one side and the maniacs to the other. And yet, just like we can’t all be above average, some of us have got to be in with the idiots or the maniacs. Or — maybe — if we could calm down and take a deep breath, we’d find that we’re really not all that attached to our political opinions, let alone sure of them. We’re just addicted to self-righteousness and argument.
As for me, I reiterate what I’ve said for years. I think of myself as a neo-Taoist, steadfastly opposed to assholism in all its many guises. It hasn’t led me astray yet.
January 4, 2020 @ 4:25 pm
As sides become more polarized and entrenched in their positions, the “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” schema becomes more problematic to maintain. For one, the “clowns” are not in power, nor do they really know what to do with it when they do have it. The “jokers” predominate in the executive and the US Senate and most of the state legislatures and countless local councils, and a good chunk of the corporate media infrastructure. Other than that they’ve been completely excised from public life. One can see why they feel so victimized.
To take just a couple of comparisons from “Winston Smith”:
Comparing “Russiagate” to “Benghazi” is spurious at best, but becomes an even worse comparison once you start drilling down to the specifics. With Benghazi you had nine full House investigations, culminating in Butter Emails testifying in person for eleven hours straight. With Russia you have a boatload of circumstantial evidence, a 400-page investigative report that no one bothered to read but clearly implicating the chief executive, and the active thwarting of the investigative process by the Attorney General of the United States, who has never so much as pretended to not be Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
All of the Russiagate stuff is out in the open, by the way, they don’t bother to hide any of it. Trump selling a house for three times what he bought it for to a Russian oligarch, the refusal to show his tax returns, the open monetization of his properties directly connected to companies and countries affected by his policies — it’s all right there, and so much more. It doesn’t qualify as a “conspiracy” when there’s no attempt to hide any of it. It’s an ongoing act of defiance, and why shouldn’t they? It’s working for them.
As far as “climate apocalypticism” goes, I don’t even know where to begin. The science is there, the events are happening in real time all over the world. Look at Australia, sweltering and burning for the last three months, not nearly finished. How many Midwest states spent a month or two last spring underwater, crops destroyed?
This is just the beginning. It’s going to get worse, and all the empty analogues to religious wingnuttery won’t change that. People who really think it’s empty hysteria will be thrilled to find some great real-estate deals along the Gulf Coast in the near future, and I encourage them to grab such deals with both hands.
I won’t pretend to be enough of a scientist or specialist to throw weight behind this or that set of data tables, though the patterns should be clear enough to any truly neutral observer. But you know what finally convinced me that it’s more likely than not? Those tree-hugging commies at the Pentagon, who announced over a decade ago that climate change was the single biggest threat to the operational security and integrity of many of our military bases worldwide.
These are serious people, with no agenda but the furtherance of American hegemony. It’s possible that some of them hope to move on to multi-billion dollar renovation contracts for Diego Garcia or whatever, but overall, I’m going to take the word of General Jack D. Ripper every time over Jim Hoft or Ben Shapiro, or whatever chiseling internet psychopath is popular this month. I may disagree with the general’s outlook on the world, but I don’t doubt his skill set or his competence. Hoft and Shapiro and that ilk are names simply because they know whose boots to lick.
I don’t like what “happened” to J.K. Rowling, but in the end, a liberal billionaire got excoriated by woke Twitter for making a perhaps tone-deaf remark about rapidly shifting gender mores. So? She’s still rich and happy, no one shunned her or slapped her or stalked her. Life goes on, as it tends to do. Despite the poignant plaints of the dopier section of the sinecured NY Times columnists, online criticism is not the next coming of the French Revolution. Usually it’s just a small neighborhood of internet dogs woofing at each other.
I think you’re right that we’re all just addicted to some extent to the righteousness of our arguments. I’ll certainly throw myself into that mix.
But we should all pay more attention to the logical proportionality of our arguments, instead of falling back on the easy trope of two opposing but equal sides. One side is in power, the other is not. One side is openly dedicated to making life harder for the vulnerable, stacking the courts every week with more and more “judges” who are unqualified, yet sincerely dedicated to the goal of eviscerating voting rights, workers’ rights, women’s reproductive rights, and more.
That’s a lot more of an offset to “drag queen story hour” or whatever the Rod Dreher culture-vulture types are up to at the moment. Everyone has the choice of not going to the story hour, but when the federal circuit court upholds the right of the state of Georgia to unplug all the voting machines in the black districts, that has a real, concrete set of effects on that state and the country. I get the feeling that Mr. Smith may not share the distinction in that observation.
It’s easy for people like us, straight married white educated males, to sit back and flick peanuts at everyone else from the gallery, because there are fewer consequences for us. But other people will be and are now affected by these things, and the people who perpetrate them. They are not equal, nor even similar in scope or degree.
(+1,000,000 internet points for the Kevin Gilbert reference in the post title.)
January 4, 2020 @ 10:17 pm
Hey, Heywood, good to see you again. You are correct that, if I can briefly paraphrase you, just because one side says “2+2=4,” and the other side says, “No, 2+2=12,” the answer is not “Clearly, 2+2=8, and you’re both fanatics.” The particulars of the argument matter, not the likability of the personalities making the argument. But to take, say, climate apocalypticism as an example — I myself tend to read a lot more conservative voices these days, especially of the more classical liberal/Never Trump variety, and honestly, I rarely if ever see any outright “denialism.” Most skeptics aren’t denying that climate is changing or that human action has nothing to do with it; they’re usually just arguing that the answer is not going to be increasing state control over the economy in general, to say nothing of incoherent lunacy like the Green New Deal. If anything, the crisis will be averted by further technological and economic advancement, which will create new dilemmas and tradeoffs, and on and on forever. Reasonable people can disagree over policy, but for many people, especially those of us who are educated just enough to be enamored of our own opinions, we don’t want to argue over boring, unsexy details. We want exciting symbology and mythological drama. And so, much of the cultural discourse over climate change becomes about some autistic teenager and what she supposedly represents, for good or ill. Granted, plenty of conservatives are motivated to emphasize doomsday freaks like the Thunbergians for their own advantage, but why does she appeal to so many progressives too? Why is she becoming a worldwide celebrity instead of Morgan Vague? How does it always end up at this lowest common denominator, dominated by the loudest and stupidest? Is this a problem on the macro level, with the media and its skewed incentives, or on the micro level, with all of us idiots clicking on the articles and throwing rhetorical pies in each other’s faces? Or both? And what, if anything, can any of us meaningfully do about it? Regulate the media? Shame our friends and neighbors for reading and sharing clickbait? Or refuse to participate altogether?
What struck me about Smith’s post wasn’t the argument about which side is more wrong, or more dangerous, or whatever, or how we would determine that. What matters more, politics, economics or culture? Material conditions or ideas? That sort of argument is like Br’er Rabbit’s tar baby; there’s absolutely no good to come from touching it. For the record, I think both tribes are honestly convinced that they’re barely holding on as their enemies conquer more and more territory, which is why I say they cancel each other out as far as I care. They’re arguing past each other, using different standards and values. Anyway, what his post made me think about was the weird sense that something significant has changed in recent years, but it’s too vague to pin down exactly what. I mean, I am not a multi-dimensional chess player. I have no useful perspective on what sort of sociopolitical transition we (and other European countries) are apparently going through right now. I have no idea how to think strategically about, say, voting, in order to get what I want. I agree that the Trump phenomenon represents something gone seriously wrong in political life. I probably feel more strongly than you that social-justice fanaticism also represents something gone seriously wrong, and I don’t share your confidence that it can be easily dismissed as some lesser symptom — yes, we can “choose” not to go to drag queen storytime hour, but it also wasn’t that long ago that you could “choose” to state the obvious fact that you don’t change from a man to a woman or vice-versa by an act of will without having to fear for your job or reputation should you be significant enough to make an example of, and most of the pilloried aren’t fortunate enough to be protected by billions of dollars. The tendency of those choices to become increasingly restricted is not trifling, in my opinion. I no longer think that PC lunacy stays confined to humanities departments, as if that isn’t tragic enough. It tends to spread to other bureaucratic environments, whether in media, government or corporate HR departments. It’s not that I fear for Rowling’s career or safety, for example; I fear for the fact that it’s become increasingly socially acceptable to become outraged over such innocuous comments as she made, that the incentives are shifting in such a way as to make people look for excuses to perform their outrage. I don’t expect literal guillotines and gulags to result, of course, but it’s still worrisome that social media has normalized this kind of mob mentality. We could go back and forth forever about what it all means “in the long run” (however that’s defined), but I’d hope we can agree that it’s a deeply unhealthy phenomenon right now. I’m not as sanguine as you that it will eventually fade away, and then we can finally get back to the serious business of hiking taxes on the super-rich to pay for an expanded social-democratic welfare state. I think that particular ship has sailed.
Most of all, I don’t think there’s anything conventionally obvious to be done. Vote for Trump to smash the social justice cult? Vote for the Democrats to return to “normalcy”? To put it so plainly makes both sound absurd. Smith is just one of an increasing number of people I’ve read who have addressed that same sense of vertigo that I’m still trying to make sense of. Nothing dramatic about me has changed in the last ten years, but yet, like the rabbit-duck illusion, or the vase/two faces kissing, it somehow seems like I see everything differently. Even though I’m looking at the same world. I’m afraid I don’t know how to make that more substantial, but anyway, that’s why I keep coming back to the theme.
Let me shift gears and try putting it this way: I just finished reading a book about Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire. There’s no neat and tidy “lessons” to be applied from it, of course. What did feel eerily familiar was the sense of inevitability as one thing led to another, with no clear and obvious point where the outcome could have been dramatically altered without the benefit of a God’s-eye view. I tend to share the pessimistic view of people like Charles Murray (who, rather than “conservative” or “libertarian,” prefers to call himself a “Madisonian” these days), who basically argues that the state has reached a point of terminal sclerosis which isn’t going to be undone by enlightened policies. My personal takeaway from all this is simply to face up to my own powerlessness and insignificance. I’m one ordinary guy with no money, power, or influence, let alone free time for activism. For most of us, personal virtue is the only good we’ll ever contribute to the world. It wouldn’t do me or anyone else any good to be impotently angry about world affairs that I can’t affect, so I choose to ignore it and just try to be a good person in everyday ways.
Well, that’s probably more rambling than useful, but I didn’t want to spend all night crafting one response. I hope it brought more light than heat. Thanks again for stopping in!
January 5, 2020 @ 5:55 pm
Oh, I don’t think you had any rambling at all. I didn’t quite realize the size of the data dump I left on your doorstep until after I actually posted. I appreciate you tackling the whole tangled ball in good faith.
To the extent that there are truly conservative or classical liberal voices left in the public arena , I try to keep an ear out for them. Most of the professional culture-con class have gone neo-reactionary, as it were, because that’s where their bread is buttered right now. If Trump and his party get dumped on their asses at some point, they’ll find another schtick to peddle. That would be your Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro types, your Ben Domenech Federalist useful idiot sort of paid agitproppers. Whatever disagreement I might have with, say, Charles Murray, he at least strikes me as an honest, principled paleocon who isn’t actively trying to chisel a living from the anger-banging Trump cult.
I totally agree with you that the question of how culture and economics and politics inform and move one another is a much more interesting topic, than merely reiterating ad nauseam the infinite ways this lawless administration is hollowing out the state, rotten timber by rotten timber. But in the end, when the institutions of state begin accelerating their collapse, that is where the action will be, the nefarious deeds that were done. I do think that mass culture does eventually color political choices; I see a lot of prog types wistfully reminiscing about The West Wing these days, and on the other side, I can see a clear pop-culture thread from the bumptious antics of the Duck Dynasty gang filtering straight through to the brain-dead adulation exhibited at the cult rallies, where all the supposedly liberal media can do is attempt to keep pace with the endless stream of lies and invective. Various tribal rhythms and cultural tropes thread through the discourse of either side.
And of course Trump himself represents the final “victory” of “reality” teevee’s pernicious, cancerous effect on the culture and how people see themselves and their government. Nothing is real and everything is possible.
Again, though: who is actually in power having a concrete effect on real human beings, and who is simply engaging in impotent (if obnoxious) internet woofing? I don’t like it either that someone might lose their job because they said something impolite about trans people on their blog or their Twitter page, but both culturally and politically, I’m far more concerned about an environment where it’s okay to disenfranchise black people, or force women who’ve had a miscarriage to hold a funeral for the fetus, or maybe even face murder or manslaughter charges. Or that the President of the United States openly profits from the telecom companies and the Saudis renting out entire empty floors of his hotel to curry political favor, when he’s not shaking down the Ukrainians or carrying Putin’s water.
Social justice warriors are annoying, but I really don’t see how they have affected much of anything beyond random anecdotes. I’ve worked in the public sector for the last decade, I’m not shy about speaking my mind, and I have never had anyone tell me what I can and can’t say. Most of the SJWs I’ve seen have fewer than 10k followers, so I would seriously question their sphere of actual influence.
The climate change issue seems to be one of framing, then: if we agree on the basic principle that technological advances will save the day — and frankly, I’m not sure that’s actually true, given the timeline we’re under, and the fact that the pace and frequency of large-scale climatic events is already increasing steadily around the world — then the state’s role in providing direction and economic incentives to move more quickly should be at the forefront of discussion. If we keep dicking around waiting for Exxon to squeeze that last precious nickel out of the mantle, it might be too late to prevent, say, Miami from going under. I do think it will take some huge catalyzing event on that scale for the powers that be to realize that it’s actually more cost-effective to make a real jump to renewable sources than to spend half a trillion every hurricane season to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Upton Sinclair had it about right.
I “like” Greta Thunberg to the extent that I am somewhat impressed by the fact that a socially awkward teenager can be focused and determined enough to become a household name around the world. But while I respect process, in the end I am more result-oriented. And so when I saw all the climate-change “protests” in cities around the world, demonstrating their supposed solidarity with Saint Thunberg, my gut reaction was that some or most of these well-meaning folks really wanted someone else to “do something” about the situation.
I wanted to ask each of them: How many children do you have? What do you drive? What do you eat, and where is it sourced? That sort of thing. I see a certain type of denialism among the progressive climate change activists as well. They don’t want to hold individuals responsible for their actions. They don’t want to talk about the effect world overpopulation has on the environment and the future. They would rather bitch about Big Oil than, you know, find a smaller and more efficient car to drive, and buy their produce at the local farmer’s market for a little more. It’s the old Simpsons bit: Can’t someone else do it? They want to keep shopping at Costco and Amazon, and have someone else figure out how to spread the pain around to others.
Even with all that in mind, they’re not the ones rolling back fuel efficiency standards, they’re not the ones opening up national parks to oil and mining companies, they’re not the ones insisting that preserving 6ok coal mining jobs is more useful than, say, incentivizing fossil fuel companies to move to renewable sources, and giving those coal miners better jobs manufacturing solar panels and windmills. (Which, despite Preznit Science’s claims, do not cause cancer.)
Put it this way: I’ll take the most obnoxious intersectionalist SJW every day of the week over the claque of facelifted televangelist vultures currently grifting out of the White House, lobbying state legislatures for bills straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, spouting real apocalypticism as if it were empirical data. These people are actually running the show, not hounding some chump on Twitter. You know? There’s things that get played in the media to generate clickbait outrage for a news cycle, and then there’s people who are actually doing things that, as I said before, are deliberately designed to harm the vulnerable as much as possible. This is where we collectively decide what kind of country we want this to be.
That’s really the core of the issue I had with Smith’s post, the odd assertion that professional lackeys like Chuck Todd and the New York Times, people who routinely transcribe the emperor’s rants and scarcely dare look him in the eye, constitute some powerful “left-wing” entity that has any measurable effect on policy. Smith flat-out says that the left’s biases are crazier than the right’s, which even as polemic is such an irresponsibly blanket contention I really don’t know where to begin pulling it apart.
I think you’re right that I am somewhat more sanguine about that sort of thing (Twitter harassment and “culture” issues in general) than many, but it’s probably because I am also more sanguine about this administration, as horrible as it is, than most liberals are. I think the pendulum swings, and it seems to swing farther and faster these days. You’re right about the inevitability of it all, the eventual collapse. The GOP is clinging to power in all but the smallest of states with a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, money, and as much propaganda as they can buy. If you can’t win without cheating, it’s because you know you’ll lose a fair fight. But they can only unplug so many voting machines before people decide to push back.
So they see the demographics, and they’ve doubled down, preferring deep support to broad. But that’s come at a price. They’re losing a lot of people permanently, as are the evangelical churches. Desperate people do desperate things, so I’m sure the worst is yet to come. Frankly, I think you have the right idea — to just stay more or less at a distance from it, observing patiently, but keeping faithful to ideas. I’ve been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy lately and seeing the value in it. The best any of us can do is just be prepared, and see things for what they really are.
Apologies for another extended response, but I really appreciate the dialogue on this, it’s making think these things through and not just be reactive.
January 6, 2020 @ 7:46 am
No apologies required. That was always the best part of the old blogosphere, the extended give-and-take of living conversation rather than ex cathedra pronouncements met by mindless praise or knee-jerk slogans in response. Naturally, like water finding its way to sea level, cultural gravity brought it down to sentence fragments, and rather than bother writing long-form posts, most people switched to tweeting 1,286 times a day, which is such a joy to try to read in sequence. (I suppose bloggers like Atrios had no trouble adapting, since he was writing tweet-sized thoughts before the platform ever existed.) But too many of the dwindling number of remaining bloggers seem to have given up on the old rituals of writing regularly and making the rounds to see what their neighbors are talking about and include them in the conversation. In fact, one simple reason I’ve kept up with Winston Smith here is because of that old-school solidarity. He’s been around as long as I can remember, and I’m pretty sure from what he’s revealed over the years that he’s a philosophy professor at a nearby university, close to our age. So even though his blog consists more of quick thoughts and loose reactions to the news cycle than extended meditations, I still read him out of a certain respect for longevity and persistence. Or, like I was saying previously, because there can be a certain value in seeing those “bellwether”-type reactions to changing circumstances.
There was a brief period around Trump’s election where conservative media became refreshingly heterodox, as everyone tried to find their footing on the shifting sands, but the battle/party lines have indeed started to become more solidly entrenched. There was that whole inter-conservative food fight between Sohrab Ahmari (representing the pro-Trump Catholic right based around First Things magazine) and David French (representing the generally Never-Trump right), where Ahmari bizarrely made French the symbol for what he considers to be the failure of Conservatism, Inc. to pump the brakes on cultural decadence. I’ve largely stopped reading The American Conservative for now because it’s become too stridently and predictably typical of Trump/Tucker Carlson populism. I don’t think I’ve ever read a single novel thought from Daniel Larison over the years; his column could probably be outsourced to AI without anyone noticing. And Dreher, though I do respect his willingness to engage with disagreement, has always struck me as too prone to Chicken Little hysterics (not to mention that I don’t share his religious priors. In fairness, he’s not a reflexive bigot, but he is an intellectual, and intellectuals, whether secular or religious, are prone to overvaluing theories and ideas, hence his tendency to see ominous auguries and ill omens everywhere). National Review still interests me, as you can still see Kevin Williamson, whom I do like as a rule, excoriating Trump in one post while someone like Rich Lowry, the editor, has started warming to Trump’s cause. I hope that sort of balance stays the case, though with other mostly-anti-Trump voices like Goldberg and French leaving to start a new venture (The Dispatch), it may not. I’ve actually come to appreciate Goldberg in recent years — I read a couple of his books with a charitable intent, and didn’t really find them objectionable. His most recent one struck me as an earnest plea, on more of a moral level than anything else, for people to try to appreciate just what an amazing culture and civilization we’ve built in the West and stop trying to tear it down in favor of some utopian fantasy of religious-based communitarian conservatism (on the right) or perfect social-justice equality (on the left). A paean to the “good enough” of procedural liberalism, in other words. David Marcus at The Federalist is generally worth reading, I think, as an amusing blogger if not a serious analyst, and the site sometimes publishes some quirky stuff I don’t see elsewhere (I discovered the weird Canadian indie web-series Letterkenny through a piece there) though in general, yes, it’s mostly SEO-clickbait for the right wing. Then of course there’s sites like Quillette, which see themselves as more data-driven and scientific than political, but which in practice tends to shake out as classical liberalism with a bit of provocative contrarianism toward the prevailing cultural wisdom.
I understand where you’re coming from with the whole “who got the power, this be my question” angle (and speaking of which, hey, hand it to Trump: he managed to make it possible for Rage Against the Machine quit exiling each other and start resurrecting their Marxpop career.) If I can attempt to summarize it (and do correct whatever needs correcting), I’ve always thought of your writing as carrying on in the tradition of the late Joe Bageant. He represented a sort of Marxish muckraking journalistic perspective to me. I don’t invoke the M-word as a condescending insult or anything; by “Marxish,” I just mean, literally, that it basically proceeds from the same class-based analytical framework as Marxism without proceeding to anti-liberal conclusions, such as “execute all the CEOs, seize their stock options, and install a dictatorship of the temp workers.” Or, to paraphrase, “Look, folks, let’s keep our eyes on the prize. All this culture-war crap is just bread and circuses designed to distract you and keep you at each other’s throats so that you won’t notice the plutocrats partying with your life’s savings and sticking you with the bill. We need to organize together around our collective identity as the moral and economic backbone of this country to keep them in line, and then maybe we can get back to the golden era of postwar prosperity and upward mobility, though without the pre-Civil Rights racism this time.”
I feel very familiar with this outlook. It was largely my own when I was younger. It’s the blues scale of left-wing thought. Everyone from Chomsky and Zinn down to Thomas Frank and Bageant have riffed on the basic theme of solidarity based around bottom-line material conditions and economics while expressing impatience with the academic radicals and the intersectional cultists. As worldviews go, it’s not incoherent, or implausible, or even invalid, but I have come to think it’s incomplete somehow. How, exactly, is what I’ve been groping blindly toward expressing whenever I return to political themes here. If we were to go back and forth citing example after example, arguing about which of realpolitik or identity politics represents the true heart and soul of the left, I think we would get nowhere but deeper down in our individual foxholes, because it would be like arguing over whether heads or tails represents the true face of the coin. You can’t have a whole coin without both, and in some way in which I feel I have yet to articulate to my satisfaction, there’s a larger context in which “both” politics fit together as one piece.
And to top it off, I’m naturally suspicious of intellectual narratives anyway. I just recently quoted from a book on religious history where the author noted amusingly that the job of most intellectuals is to run along in the wake of events explaining with perfect hindsight why it was always destined to turn out that way. I do think it’s obvious, not just here, but all throughout the West, loosely defined, that something’s happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, but I’m not confident that our old truisms and frameworks will help us predict where it’s all going. And maybe by the time we’re doddering old men, things will have solidified, and someone will have written the definitive account of how the internet and changing economic and demographic trends combined in a slow-motion catastrophe over a few decades to produce…this, whatever this may be.
Well, don’t be a stranger. It’s always good to carry on the old conversational traditions. As David Thompson always says about his own blog, “the comment discussions are often far better than the posts, which is the point.” Though, if you’ve been checking in periodically, you’ve probably noticed I aim (aim) to spend more time engaging with whatever I’m reading than with current events and pop culture, so it might not be that interesting to anyone else. But I make no excuses; I just enjoy amateur writing and trying to get incrementally better at it. (In fact, I admit that a large part of my increased focus on the cultural left is because, as I’ve turned my attention away from the news and back toward the arts, I’ve been horrified, like Heather MacDonald, at just how much senseless damage these barbarians have done to the old humanistic traditions.)